I write about non-binary gender identities and music. I'm a synth musician and netlabel owner at Vulpiano Records. AA grad in LGBT Studies and Library Technology as of this spring. I am an avid reader, post-punk enthusiast, and new aesthetic curator.
GENERAL TAGS
ACTOR ALBUM ART ANIMAL ANIME ART ASK ASTRONOMY AUTHOR BOOKS ESOTERIC FASHION FILM FOOD GENDER GIF GLITTER INTERIOR DESIGN LIBRARY MANGA MODEL MUSIC NEWS PHOTOGRAPHY PLANT QUOTE SCENERY SCANS SEXUALITY TEXT TOYS TYPOGRAPHY VIDEO VIDEO GAMES
SPECIFIC TAGS
FARIS BADWAN CARL BARAT BLUR BLYTHE DENNIS COOPER DANIELLE DAX FINAL FANTASY FOX ADAM GREEN THE HORRORS THE LIBERTINES MANIC STREET PREACHERS NICO PICTUREPLANE POKEMON SAILOR MOON SAN FRANCISCO OSCAR WILDE
Hi, I’m Marilyn Roxie, 23 year-old college student, resident of San Francisco, and owner of a diverse array of websites. My passions are music, gender and sexuality studies, and information science. In my free time, I’m writing, making lists, pursuing productivity and “lifehack” methods, Wiki Walking, listening to music, reading, playing video games, and getting back into learning Japanese.
I’ve been into music since I was little, at first influenced by my parents’ tastes. My own musical interests initially developed through a love of Kraftwerk’s Computer World, playing the keyboard, and learning the video game soundtrack tunes of Koji Kondo and Nobuo Uematsu by ear. Through my teen years, I used a variety of guides to shape my interests and help in my quest to find as much notable and fabulous music as possible. Chief prompts of music exploration at this time period included a Blender interview with Elijah Wood, the Killers Community, 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, delving into the world of music blogs, and, a little later, Last.fm and Rate Your Music. My biggest music fandom involvement has been with the Manic Street Preachers, the Horrors, the Libertines, Adam Green, the Who, thenewno2, the Fall, and post-punk in general.
As fond as I was of exploring the canons of others, at some point I knew I would have to create my own from what I’ve learned about and discovered, through blogging and a healthy obsession with playlist-making. I started the music blog A Future in Noise as a place to store my thoughts on music and promote artists that I liked (particularly independent and unsigned artists), along with other team members.
I released my own synth compositions 2008 through 2009, spurned on by the acquisition of a KORG and Propellerhead Reason; I taught History of Rock Music and Beginning Piano workshops at my former high school around the same time. Artists who have been influential/inspirational in my music: Belbury Poly, Cocteau Twins, Cluster, Julian Cope, Dead Can Dance, Danielle Dax, Depeche Mode, Delia Derbyshire, Brian Eno, Fad Gadget, Harmonia, Jean Michel Jarre, Koji Kondo, Kraftwerk, Natural Snow Buildings, Nico, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Soft Cell, Spectrum, Suicide, Nobuo Uematsu, Yello, and Susumu Yokota. New compositions from me are currently on hiatus, but you can still listen to the previous ones on Last.fm. I would recommend my album New Limerent Object as a starting point. Meanwhile, I’ve been running the netlabel Vulpiano Records since November 2009, with free Creative Commons-licensed releases only. Top-listened to artists on the label as of early 2012 include Natural Snow Buildings, Fire Island Pines, and Unsub.
Gender and sexuality studies as an interest came along in my adulthood, developed from working out my own identity from my teen years through the present. I didn’t know how the words to describe myself at the time, nor did I have access to the queer or trans* community that would help me realize that I wasn’t alone, like I gratefully have access to now. A combination of fortuitous interests and events coalesced that aided in feeling more at ease with my body and identity, including: moving to San Francisco, my adoration of the cross-dressing Nicky Wire, a friend’s recommendation of Poppy Z. Brite’s writing, Kate Bornstein’s My Gender Workbook, Carol Queen and Lawrence Schmiel’s PoMoSexuals, and learning about a panoply of identities that brought my closer to self-awareness, first as “girlfag”, then ”femme transman”, and, finally, reasonably content at present as “androgynous non-binary individual and shy twink-wannabe who is quite gay.”
I started my site Genderqueer Identities in September 2010 as a place to host a design for the genderqueer flag I created and to share information about genderqueerness, covering definitions, history of the term and associated community, academic research, health, and compilations of external genderqueer-related resources including articles, organizations, social media, and books, now encompassing non-binary identities in general. For more detail, my life experience told within the frame of gender and sexual identity is available on Genderqueer Identities.
In my first semester of college, I decided to take an Intro to LGBT Studies class, even though I was scared of potentially being “out” about my identity. This turned out to be a good move and the support of the incredible teachers in this subject area has led me to pursue a double-major in LGBT Studies and Library Information Technology. My newfound interest in library tech came about from my introduction to the field in a required library class for a journalism major I had been considering. Learning library tech meshed well with my already well-developed interests in organization and information access.
I would very much like a career in the Bay Area library world in the near future and I’m looking at queer and sexological possibilities (perhaps academic research or teaching) in the farther future. I’m very grateful that I’ve been able to combine my interests in sexuality and libraries by interning at the Center for Sex & Culture from summer 2011 to April 2013. I found out about CSC through familiarity with Carol Queen’s writing and work as Staff Sexologist at Good Vibrations and had interviewed her at the Center in March 2011 for an LGBT American History class assignment. You can read more about my social media and library internship experience here in a post at the CSC Tumblr. Serving as a combination of library tech, social media manager, and webmaster, I helped get the Center for Sex and Culture’s library indexed on Goodreads, began a resource guide collecting links for various international organizations concerning gender, sex, and sexuality, and raised $2000 for CSC’s Grace Alley Mural project through social media. I have also interned in social media for the film and magazine project [SSEX BBOX].
What motivates much of what I do is a desire to teach, share, and learn. If I know about something that I could help others learn about or if I’ve compiled a collection of resources, I want to make that available for people to access and enjoy. This is why information science and concepts such as copyleft and open-source education are important to me. My own self-discovery was limited in scope when I did not know how to access information and like-minded communities in terms of queer and trans* identity and this caused me a lot of personal suffering, so I began to wonder how I could help others not be in such a position as this. I want to help others learn how to make use of resources that will enrich their lives, focused currently in particular in my compilation of resources at Genderqueer Identities, though I believe this motivation to learn and encourage others to learn touches everything I do.