I'm Ash. I live in Auckland, New Zealand, right in the city centre. I study fine arts, I work (volunteer) in radio, write album reviews on a freelance basis both online and in print, and do some work in art galleries, usually at openings. Most weeks my work rounds out to about 20 hours, but it's all unpaid, and that's going to be a problem over summer, which my student allowance won't cover. I host an internet radio show or two. I'm also a musician myself, and I'm a self-published author. I'm genderqueer/neutral and proud. I spend what some would call "way too much" time on the internet, but I think it's just about right.
Dude, your EP is awesome. Have you ever been out of New Zealand? How do you compare it to other places you've seen? I'd love to visit. If I may ask, could you elaborate on being genderqueer/neutral? What does that mean, at least to you? I've got some weird kinda thoughts on my mind recently and I'm curious if yours are similar to mine.
Cheers! I've only really been to Australia, and then only two cities and not for any extended period of time. I like New Zealand, for the most part. It's varied. I'm MAAB (male-assigned-at-birth) but don't feel male. But I don't feel exclusively female, either. It used to be that I'd swing between male, female, and somewhere in between, but recently it's been more neutral/female/neither than anything. It's sort of tough to put into terms of gender, I think, because in my mind I don't really have a gender, I just have moods - and those moods happen to align with things like femininty, masculinity, and androgyny. Personally, it manifests in that I've started wearing makeup (mostly natural stuff with some colour around the eyes), more colourful clothing and "women's" clothing (started with women's jeans because boy are they comfy as hell, but a few weeks back I went to a party in a dress and got a heap of compliments). I started the process of medical transition earlier this year but got turned away because of age (a horrid fucking reason) and because I'm not a binary transgender - that is, straight up male-to-female. When I do transition (which is a while off seeing as the trans* clinic in my town got shut down the other month) either I won't go all the way (which is actually becoming less likely) or I will and then start to dress androgynously, but working with a more feminine base body. All just trying to align my body with who I am in my head.
I mean no offense to anyone else but this perhaps the most interesting introduction imo, thank you! Maybe I'll post it somewhere when I'm up for it, but I've had this sort of 'opening' to what beauty and attraction mean, and I've convinced myself that beauty is universal, and that 'natural' heterosexuality doesn't really mean anything when it comes to being attracted to people. By this I mean, if a guy is attractive to, say, a girl, that means that that guy is attractive. Maybe not to me, or to anyone else, but to that girl he is attractive. So, just as the girl has a certain set of values that the guy matches, there's nothing stopping me from having a similar set of values that will correspond to what the guy has. I'm a guy and I am very very much into girls, but I think I'm understanding where gays, lesbians, etc. are coming from. Also, a girl I was into some years ago turned me down because she was with someone. Just today, she told me that someone was a girl-- she (my friend) is not a lesbian. She just found this other lesbian girl attractive, and realized what I realized about beauty. I'm probably explaining this horribly, but I'm just figuring it out, so your story really helped :) Edit: I dont mean to generalize when I say I know where gays and lesbians and so on are coming from, I've always accepted them but never really 'got it.' I realize everyone's story is different. Edit2: Upon rereading I realize I didn't make much sense. Apologies.
It's okay! I think realisations like this are getting more and more common. I had the same one a few years back, and then a similar one in terms of gender more recently. Have you read Plato's Symposium? There's a speech in there (you could read it out of context, it stands alone pretty well - The Speech of Diotima) that talks about some of the stuff you just did - universal beauty and the like. You might find it interesting.
Oh, I know! ;) (though to be honest I didn't realise you were E.H. Brogan until this thread. Or, rather that E.H. Brogan was _refugee_)