From the Editor

With amazement, we note that OutSmart is celebrating our seventh anniversary. As we launch into our eighth year of publishing, we’d like to announce a change in our masthead.

Since our inception, we’ve called OutSmart "Houston’s gay & lesbian monthly magazine." Now we are going to change our tagline to read: "Houston’s gay, lesbian, bi, and trans magazine." We hope this description better fits who we are.

In truth, we’ve been working to include the transgender community in the magazine all along, for we believe that what you call yourself is less important than what you do. The world of transgender issues and considerations is new territory to many of us, and so we’re learning. I’m thankful to several members of the T community who have been patient with me and helped me get over my feelings of awkwardness and understand better what being transgendered is all about. In particular, I’d like to thank Lilly Roddy, our astrologer (who graced our cover last month, pictured at right), who has been a patient teacher to myself and many others in the office. "Sometimes being an activist is just being who you are" (as eloquently said by Jose Niño, an out staff member at MECA [Multi-Culture Education and Counseling through the Arts]). Thank you, Lilly, for just being your wonderful self, and thereby being a leader to us all.

When one starts taking pains to be inclusive, we know the laundry lists of subgroups can get a tad ridiculous. We’ll admit that, word types that we are, just the awkwardness of the lengthly "gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans-gendered" (gay is such a neat short word) gave us pause, politics aside. When we announced last month the excellent decision by the chamber to include B&T in their name, I couldn’t repress the joke that their new acronym GHGLBTCC almost spells "gibbligook." But we will also say that we were inspired by the chamber’s leadership, and decided it was time to move on this item we’d long discussed. Ungainly as laundry lists can be, I think we probably need to start with some clumsy acronyms so that we can spell out that we really are inclusive–as all the subgroups in the list get to know each other, then we can go back to just being people.

Why haven’t we changed the OutSmart tagline before now? The debate is not a simple one. I’d argue that all generalizations and boundaries are to some degree false, misleading. To put out a gay (or a GL or a GLBT) magazine is already a bit of a tricky proposition: Why focus just on this one aspect of the rich and whole people we are?

But we also know, and know in a deep way, that it is important to state clearly that we are gay...or lesbian...or bisexual...or transgendered. Because being queer has not been okay, it’s important to explore in the light of day what one’s sexuality/gender is all about. I see it as a pendulum swing that many groups go through who have been oppressed–first the dark ages when we are persecuted and suppressed, then a revolution in which we take the pendulum in the opposite direction and proclaim loud and clear, "We are queer and we are here!" And then...and then the pendulum will eventually seek a place of rest at the center, when being gay is seen as no more denigrated or noteworthy than the many other aspects and roles that make up a person–having black hair, being an older sister, loving music. And I suppose there’s nothing wrong with having a speciality magazine to explore this one facet of our wonderful selves. We’ve always strived to make OutSmart much more about wholeness than about separation.

So all this is to say that drawing these lines of definition is artificial to begin with, and fraught with the context of the oppresion we’re fighting. Should the gay movement embrace the transgender movement? Lord knows that’s a huge issue–with intelligent arguments on both sides–and I won’t try to adequately address it here. But this quandry has a familiar ring, as familiar as that pendulum I discussed, for it comes up whenever there are groups fighting against oppression, and groups even more oppressed seek to use the momentum to gain their own justice in the world. It reminds me of when the fight for the abolition of slavery was gaining widespread momentum in this country in the 1800s–because women were taking leadership roles in the anti-slavery movement, the issue of women’s rights started gaining attention. As women fought for the rights of African-Americans, it was only natural to say, "Wait a minute, what about my rights too?!" And against this argument was made the objection that lumping women’s rights in with rights for African-Americans would endanger the cause. I don’t have an answer on that one: These aren’t simple cut-and-dried questions.

Likewise, should the transgendered movement be included in the gay movement, even though one is a question of sexual orientation and the other is a question of gender orientation? I don’t know for sure. But my heart says that in our magazine, it feels right to try and be as open as we are able. If I’m going to err, I’d rather err on the side of inclusiveness.

So, OutSmart welcomes a few more labels to its masthead. Actually, we hope to not keep them there for very long. We’d like to move toward a tagline such as, "Celebrating Houston’s diverse community." For instead of breaking people down into categories, we’d rather bring everyone together. But we decided on this step because we felt it was important to say, and say specifically, that we are proud to include the transgendered members of our community.

Ann Walton Sieber