Filling a Much-Needed Void : Hanne Blank's Blog

Straight!

I’ve got a new book out, y’all.

Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality has dropped. I could not be more thrilled, I really truly couldn’t.

It’s in the New York Times!

It’s also in Haaretz.

And in PW’s Tip Sheet.

Also in the EDGE papers (scroll down).

I debuted the book, actually, this past Friday, at the Creating Change conference that was, this year, held here in Baltimore, in a lecture called “Let’s Get Some Things Straight: What Queer Community Leaders Need To Know About The History of Heterosexuality.”

And because my beloved friend S. Bear Bergman was good enough to aim my phone at me while I was talking from time to time, and snag a little bit of video of me running my mouth, I’m going to share some snippets of that talk with you here…

Hanne’s Creating Change talk snippets….

Enjoy. And, y’know, go buy a book. Or if you want the ebook, that’s cool too.

Sneak Preview!

I’m delighted to let you know that a sneak preview of my forthcoming Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality is now up online for your reading pleasure! Check it out here:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/75045025/Straight-Introduction

Heterosexuality is not a fact of nature, it’s a nineteenth-century invention, only about as old as the traffic light. In this surprising chronicle, historian Hanne Blank digs deep into the past of sexual orientation while simultaneously exploring its contemporary psyche. Illuminating the hidden patterns in centuries of events and trends, Blank shows how culture creates and manipulates the ways we think about and experience desire, love, and relationships between men and women. Ranging from Henry VIII to testicle transplants, Disneyland to sodomy laws, and Moby Dick to artificial insemination, the history of heterosexuality turns out to be anything but straight or narrow. With an eclectic scope and fascinating detail, Straight tells the eye-opening story of a complex and often contradictory man-made creation that is all too often assumed to be an irreducible fact of biology.

What are other people saying about STRAIGHT so far?

Review Publishers Weekly - September 1, 2011

“From its thorough but brisk explorations of sexual orientation’s intersections with sex, gender, and romance, this illuminating study examines our presuppositions and makes a powerful, provocative argument that heterosexuality—mazy, unscientific, and new—may be merely ‘a particular configuration of sex and power in a particular historical moment.’”Quotes
“With impeccable research and detail, Hanne Blank uncovers the fascinating, often hidden, history of heterosexuality. Straight is a marvelous cultural history that is as entertaining as it is profoundly enlightening and necessary for understanding the world in which we live.”—Michael Bronski, author of A Queer History of the United States

“Hanne Blank has rendered a meticulously researched romp through the history of ‘heterosexuality’—that pesky orthodoxy still looming over Western culture like smog. Her sweeping synthesis takes on everything from Freud to Larry Craig, expertly weaving this untold history with insight and a refreshing dose of irreverence.”—Lisa M. Diamond, author of Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire

“What would it mean to dispense with our current categories of sexual identity? Writing with grace and wit, Hanne Blank demonstrates that what sounds like a radical proposition is also historically inevitable. This is a book that really shakes up an assumption or two!”—Laura Kipnis, author of How To Become a Scandal and Against Love

“Challenging our culture’s deeply entrenched, stubborn assumption of heterosexuality, Straight helps us to think newly and critically. Starting from her own experience, Hanne Blank creatively analyses the unexamined idea that heterosexuality is given, unchanging, ahistorical.”—Jonathan Ned Katz, author of The Invention of Heterosexuality and co-director OutHistory.org

The book hits the shelves on January 31, and will be debuting at the Creating Change conference in Baltimore on January 27 with a 90-minute intensive workshop on the book and the remarkable, little-known, fascinating history of heterosexuality.

Also, I am currently booking campus talks and guest lectures about STRAIGHT and the history of heterosexuality — feel free to pass this blog post along to anyone you know who might be interested in having me come and speak!

2012 01 06 Hanne Blank books
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Rules for 2012

Inspired, in part, by this wonderful photo of Woody Guthrie’s magnificent list of New Years Rulin’s (originally found here), I thought I would share with you a few of my own New Years Rules.

Not resolutions, you note. Just… rules. Which I think are more useful than resolutions.

Do something every day that makes your life easier, even if it’s trivial.

Practice saying no to some things so that you can say yes to better things.

Do something today that will make your body a better place to live tomorrow.

Make some art. ”The function of the artist is to provide what life does not,” wrote Tom Robbins in a sentence that has stuck with me for 20 years now. Provide the answer to someone else’s question, the question to someone else’s answer, necessary and white-hot and beautiful.

Happy 2012, y’all. May it bring you all good things. And, pace Woody, keep that hoping machine running.

2012 01 03 Hanne Blank behavior
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No, it is too much, let me sum up!

We seem to be rolling through the last week of 2011 at a barrelling clip. I’m going hammer and tongs at a bunch of things, all at once, and some of them are really big and kind of scary. Some of them are the kinds of things where I am just taking a deep breath and closing my eyes and leaping, and some of them are the kinds of things where I am like the Little Engine that Could, all chugging and going “I think I can I think I can.”

What they all have in common is that they’re exhilarating and they’re taking a lot of doing but I feel pretty firmly like my feet are pointed in the right direction. It’s a good way to feel going in to a new year, honestly.

I don’t know the half of what the new year will hold for me. But one thing I can tell you for absolute sure is that 2012 is not going to be just another year like any other, at least not around here. I mentioned this morning on Twitter that I am limbering up… because I’ll be burning hotter and brighter and fiercer than ever before.

I know, I know. Don’t you go rolling your eyes at me, Missy. I realize it sounds like the kind of thing that people are supposed to say at this time of year, and perhaps like I’ve been hitting the sweet sweet New Age “abundance mentality” crackpipe a little too hard.

So what I’m going to say instead is: watch this space. Take your vitamins. And fasten your seat belts.

And while you’re at it, three things you need to know:

January 18 at 7 pm, New York City
We have a date, you and I, at the bar at the Museum of Sex in New York City. C’mon out. I promise I’ll wear cute shoes, fantastic lipstick, I’ll make you laugh, and maybe I’ll let you buy me a drink.

January 27 from 9-10:30 am, Baltimore
Join me for Let’s Get Some Things Straight, a workshop on the history of heterosexuality that I’ve created especially for LGBT activists, debuting at the Creating Change conference here in Baltimore. It’s where I’m launching my exciting new book! Here’s the scoop:

Far from being an eternal human constant, heterosexual is only as old as the typewriter and the light bulb. When it comes to giving queer community new tools for activist thinking, this is a good thing. Author and historian Hanne Blank, author of the new book Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality, provides an overview of the history of straightness geared toward helping LGBTIQ activists speak deeper and better- informed truths to power.

If you’ll be at Creating Change you will find the location listed in your program book. Let me know if you’ll be there!

Name Your Place, Name Your Time
I am booking talks and campus visits about Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality as well as Big Big Love, Virgin, and my other work. I’m especially excited to offer a talk I debuted at Harvard University last spring, called “Virgins and Other Indefinite Articles: Thinking Historically about Sexuality, Definition, and Experience,” which builds bridges between my work on virginity, my work on heterosexuality, and the task of writing history about sex.

I’m also offering a brand new program, An Evening With Hanne Blank, an uncensored, funny, radical evening of history, storytelling, and humor about sex, bodies, and culture that runs the gamut of my work from the erotic to the erudite… and may even include a song or two. So talk to me!

2011 12 27 Hanne Blank Administrative
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Terri Windling, my books, and you

From the Magick4Terri auction:

Beloved editor, artist and writer Terri Windling is in need, and we are asking for your help in a fundraising auction to assist her. This auction will combine donations from professionals and fans in an online sale to help Terri through a serious financial crisis. Terri is the creator of groundbreaking fantasy and mythic art and literature over the past several decades, ranging from the influential urban fantasy series Bordertown to the online Journal of Mythic Arts. With co-editor Ellen Datlow, she changed the face of contemporary short fiction with The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and other award-winning anthologies, including Silver Birch, Blood Moon, and The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest. Her remarkable Endicott Studio blog continues to bring music, poetry, art and inspiration to people all over the world.

Terri Windling and her family have been coping with health and legal issues that have drained her financial resources at a critical time. Due to the serious nature of these issues, and privacy concerns for individual family members, we can’t be more specific than that, but Terri is in need of our support. As a friend, a colleague and an inspiration, Terri has touched many, many lives over the years. She has been supremely generous in donating her own work and art to support friends and colleagues in crisis. Now, Terri is in need of some serious help from her community. Who better than her colleagues and fans to rise up to make some magick for her?

That’s where we come in. Until December 15th, we’ll be bringing you auctions (and vice-versa!) of art, books, collectibles, music, and more amazing offers from the awesome fantasy art and literature communities.

I, too, am a fan of Terri Windling, someone who has benefited from her work, someone who has been blessed by the love and the sorcery and the delight and the insight she’s shared with so many of us.

I’m offering two items in this auction, and if you like, you may go and bid on a signed, personalized copy of Big Big Love or a signed, personalized copy of Virgin: The Untouched History. Bid early, bid often, but most importantly, bid high if you can.

And oh, don’t neglect to look at the rest of what’s on offer. There is some utterly astonishing stuff up for bid, and you’re really going to kick yourself if you miss this.

2011 12 06 Hanne Blank Administrative
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Sunday Sundry

Happy Monday, my dears.

I would be remiss not to remind you all that signups for the Commie Pinko Writing Contest are still open. We’re about halfway full on fiction, so if you’re thinking about being a fictionaut with us, now’s the time to get in while the getting’s good. There are scads of nonfic spaces still open, as well, so perhaps you’ll be brave and join us for that.

Yesterday we went to the Mayor’s Christmas Parade, which winds right through my neighborhood, Hampden. I failed, stupidly, to take my own camera, but my Belovedary managed to snap a few pictures at my request, and I share some of them with you here.

First, the float that made me gasp open-mouthed:

Hampden Christmas Parade -- giant cross float with manger scene on top

Why yes, that is indeed a giant wooden cross on top of which the holy family is perched, with angels above them waving to the crowd. Had I been in charge of giving these things names, I would’ve called it “Manger Danger,” because that thing has a serious slope on it and had the blessed infant — who was made of plastic in this instance, mind — taken a tumble, the Lamb of God would’ve been gyros meat in a nanosecond under the tires of whatever lurks beneath that old rugged crossy shell. I must not have been the only one who half hoped for some excitement of that sort, but none transpired.

Best of all this float had brass-looking placards on both ends, like bumper stickers. The one on the back said “Jesus is coming, be prepared!” and I was not the only one who mentioned wanting to alter it to end with “…look busy!”

The divine lovelies at Ma Petite Shoe pulled out all the stops per usual, and their Mrs. Claus was sort of a Marie Antoinette Claus, with a giant headpiece wig that incorporated a fully functional fishbowl-sized snow globe.

MrsClaus_Hampden2011

Among the other highlights, of which I have no particularly good pictures, were the well-costumed members of the Maryland chapter of the 501st Legion — Star Wars cosplayers, with an imposing Darth Vader in a Santa hat — and some delightful New Orleans-style mummers, whose presence in a Christmas parade somehow worked better than it should’ve.

There were also furries. Including a blue plush-suited dragon with bondage straps on his tail, which we all thought slightly the wrong kind of festive, somehow. I’m not sure how it works that furries end up in the Christmas parade, but welcome to Baltimore, how’d you like the show?

Later on that evening there was a nice pot of chicken and dumplings, thanks to my having scored a couple of fantastic, flavorful, lives-well-lived stewing hens at the farmer’s market. You can take the girl out of the Midwest, as I am occasionally wont to note, but you cannot take the Midwest out of the girl.

chicken and dumplings

And no, before you ask, there is not a recipe. It’s chicken and dumplings. You just put things in until it looks right. Including lots of onion and parsnip, because chicken and dumplings tastes best with plenty of onion and parsnip.

2011 12 05 Hanne Blank Entrees
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Commie Pinko Writing Contest Signups are Open!

Let the merry frolic commence! Signups are now open for the 2012 Commie Pinko Writing Contest!

What is the Commie Pinko, you ask? Well, it’s a writing contest I dreamed up a buncha years back, on the premise that writing contests would be a lot more fun if you actually got to read what other people wrote, and if the opinions of the actual people participating in the contest counted in helping to decide who won.

Furthermore, I decided it’d be fun if the prizes — rather than being done by having people pay entry fees and then divvying up the pot or whatever — were also done by committee, with every participant sending in a prize, forming a pot of really fabulous stuff that would then be divided amongst the winners, each of whom would get a magnificent Lucky Dip box in the mail. Along with bragging rights, and such.

So that’s the basics of the Commie Pinko. And I decided to revive it, after several years’ hiatus, because, well, it’s fun.

There are two categories this year, short story and creative nonfiction or essay. There will be themes, generated prior to the writing period, by our all-star Politburo.

And perhaps there will be YOU. Check out the link, read the details, and, if you like, join me!

2011 12 01 Hanne Blank Administrative
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Winter Cranberry-Cherry Pie

It’s been rather a while since I’ve posted a recipe here, hasn’t it? I apologize that this wasn’t available before Thanksgiving, but truth be told I invented this pie for my own Thanksgiving table and so it simply wasn’t around long enough in advance for me to share it with you in time for that.

Nevertheless, it’s a wonderful winter pie and I’m sure you’ll find some time or other during the next month or two when trotting out a beautiful, tart-sweet, brightly-colored, vitamin-C-rich fruit pie will be precisely the right thing to do. It hearkens to other pies I love, Shaker and Amish in origin, that use dried fruit when the fresh versions are so out of season as to be almost unimaginable.

A fully cooked, whole cranberry-cherry pie

To make it, you will need the following

Pie crust sufficient for a double-crust pie
A 9 or 10 inch diameter pie dish
4 cups fresh cranberries, washed and picked over
2 1/2 cups dried tart cherries (lightly sweetened, which is typically how they’re sold, is fine)
1 to 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar (depending on your tastes, and whether your cherries are sweetened)
juice of 3 medium oranges
zest of 2 medium oranges
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
3 Tablespoons ginger liqueur, such as creme de gingembre or Domaine de Canton
1/2 cup King Arthur Flour Pie Filling Enhancer OR about 1/4 cup powdered arrowroot starch mixed with 1/4 cup sugar

1. Preheat the oven to 350F Roll out one half of your pie crust and line the pie dish with it. Blind bake the bottom crust 20-30 minutes, until well set and golden in places.

2. While the bottom crust is blind baking and then cooling, simmer the cranberries, dried cherries, orange juice, orange zest, liqueur, cinnamon, and sugar together in a large saucepan until some of the cranberries have burst and the cherries have begun to plump up and the whole is nice and hot. Remove from heat and let cool somewhat before adding the Pie Filling Enhancer (or the DIY equivalent), and stir thoroughly to combine and distribute the thickener evenly throughout the mixture.

It will look a bit like this:

winter cranberry-cherry pie filling, cooking

3. Pour the pie filling into the prepared pie crust. Top with a second crust in whatever format floats your boat. With pies like this one, I like using a cookie cutter to cut out little pie-crust shapes, then laying them on top of the filling.

4. Bake at 350F for about an hour, or until the filling is thoroughly cooked and set and the top crust is nicely golden. Cool well before cutting, as a too-hot cranberry behaves, in the mouth, in a manner uncomfortably reminiscent of napalm.

2011 11 29 Hanne Blank baking
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Thanksgiving

To those of you who celebrate it, Happy American Thanksgiving. I celebrate it aware of the great historical and continuing problems it often subsumes in a tide of compulsory consumption, but also aware, and in great gratitude, for the chance to spend time with people I love, enjoying good food and what is one of our very few national days of rest.

If you feast today, may your feast honor the dead and give joy to the living, recognize the past and provide a chance to strengthen yourself to keep on struggling toward a better future, and may you deeply appreciate and savor the good fortune you have to do it.

And if you don’t feast today, may you do the same.

Here’s what will be on the table at my house today.

Cheese Straws
Crispy kale
Green beans marinated in garlic-almond vinaigrette

Roasted turkey
Giblet gravy
Herbed bread dressing
Roasted root vegetables: parsnip, carrot, sweet potato, baby turnips
Sweet potato casserole (made by a guest)
Sweet corn (made by a guest)
Mystery Green Vegetable (made by a guest)

Jellied cranberry sauce
Cranberry and roasted garlic chutney
Orange, cranberry, and port conserves

Dinner rolls
Butter

Cranberry-Montmorency Cherry Pie
Apple Pie
Honey Cinnamon Vanilla ice cream
Bourbon whipped cream

Samuel Smith’s Nut Brown Ale
Heavy Seas Great Pumpkin Ale
Boordy vineyards chardonnay

Gingerbread rum (homemade)
Candied grapefruit liqueur (homemade)
Lemon-ginger liqueur (homemade)
Rozes white port

Tip of the foodie hat and great gratitude to all the very hard workers at Trickling Springs Creamery (Chambersburg, PA), Maple Lawn Farm (Fulton, MD), Broom’s Bloom Dairy (Bel Air, MD) , One Straw Farm (White Hall, MD) , Baugher’s Orchard (Westminster, MD), Daisy Flour (Annville, PA), Boordy Vineyard (Hydes, Maryland), Hamilton Bakery (Baltimore), the Waverly Farmer’s Market, and the Baltimore Food Co-Op. With the exception of a few spices and drinkables, and a bit of orange zest, everything that will be on the table at my house today was produced within a hundred miles of where it will be eaten.

2011 11 24 Hanne Blank baking
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Ritornello

I’ve just gotten home from my road trip. For those of you who couldn’t make it, here’s a photo of Elizabeth, the events manager at the wondrous Charis Books, introducing my reading. The photo was taken by my lovely, talented, and stylish assistant Alysia. Apparently she also took a closeup of my fishnet-clad legs at one point but she didn’t put it up on her Flickr, so you will just have to imagine that.

Hanne Blank being introduced at Charis Books, Atlanta

More regular programming, including Mrs. Avoirdupois’ latest missive, will resume soon.

2011 11 15 Hanne Blank Administrative
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Filling a Much-Needed Void