STEP 1: do your research. like any job, modeling requires knowledge. this is especially true if u’r tryin’ to be a certain “type” of model. read as many books as u can. u can start with Milon’s Stud Modeling 101 coming out soon.

STEP 2: take a modeling class and/or find a mentor.u need 2 know how 2 walk, pose and stand. and now-a-days speaking might be required. models don’t just do still photographs. they do television commercials too.

STEP 3: get a makeover to look the part. get that ‘hurr did’. fix them eyebrows. update the wardrobe. if u got skin “issues” clear them up. hit the gym. it’s easier to work with people that need as little photoshop as possible. while Hard Candy Wall Calendar has no physical requirements and works with real womyn of all shapes and sizes, the “real world” is a whole lot less forgiving.

STEP 4: set up a portfolio. this book should have pictures of you posing in different ways. your portfolio will b your visual resume. a comp card is also a must for anyone considering a serious modeling career. I will discuss in detail in a later post.

STEP 5: get an agent. this is something that i’ve only read about. but i’ve seen plenty of people get pretty far without one.

STEP 6: go 2 open calls at modeling agencies 2 learn if u have potential. but even if they say u don’t (which they will 2 many stud models), keep going. u can get lots of tips and ideas from the pros.

STEP 7: sign up with a reputable modeling website that will get u noticed.

STEP 8: model. model. model. walk as many runways. take as many pictures as u can. get that experience. build up that resume. get your name and face out there.

as an androgynous model, u will face hurdles that no other model will face. your unique image is not something that everyone can handle. the key is to present yourself in a way that says “i can’t b put in a box and that is what makes me beautiful.”

i’ve said b4 and i’ll say it a million times more that my gyrl is the inspiration behind the Hard Candy Calendar project. but she isn’t the only source of inspiration. the world is my inspiration. a great song can force me 2 c things that i never seen b4. a gorgeous movie can make me write a poem. the smell of cookies makes me wanna dance. u know that happy dance that little kids do. singing “i’m gon get some coooookieess!” yeah. that’s inspiration. anything that causes a show of self expression is inspiration. a musician on the street makes me wanna write a screenplay. a piece of garbage blowing in the wind makes me want 2 step up 2 a podium and make a speech. inspired, i am. but u know what inspires me the most? people doing stuff.

LOL i know that sounds incredibly simple. almost stupid. but look around u. there are soo many people not doing a damn thing with themselves. nothing. y’all see them in your family. or maybe one or two of your friends. only one or two tho. cuz if u got more friends than that who aren’t about anything, then chances are u aren’t either. i’m just saying like attracts.

i have been fortunate 2 b inspired by people who are doing all kinds of things. from the grand (writing, directing a producing a movie), to the sublime (counseling cancer patients), to the pure (spending every week caring for grandparents). doing something, anything, with yourself is not an impossible task. nor is it a requirement in life. that’s why it’s such a big deal 2 me. just like Joe Clark said, “all i gotta do is stay black and die”. some people have taken that to heart. so the ones that step way from that and decide to write a poem. or spend extra time tending to their garden, i can’t help but notice.

Nike has the best slogan in the world. Just Do It. beautiful in its simplicity. full of power. dynamic. and inspiring.

so y’all know what i do. what do u do? inspire me.

my gyrl wrote a piece that was supposed to be posted for the Independence Day. but i’m glad i waited. it works so much better now. so i’m gonna turn over today’s post to her.

After Further Reflection…
by Danielle Jones

I have always had to fight..fight for space in my mother's womb..fight to be seen as one, not two..fight to come out at fifteen..fight to express my talents creatively..fight fear..fight love..fight to just be..me..
Now I live confidently...

Hard Candy Calendar has produced beyond our wildest dreams. Our models have been featured on stage, in films and on the runway. The pathway that HC models have tread is truly making an endellible mark on our community. What began as merely an artistic expression with a charitable intent has created a space where dominant women are presented beautifully and authentically.

And after further reflection, I am celebrating seven years of healing now.. I actually finished my final treatments in June 2003. I guess last year was about celebrating the lessons of the process..this year..this year is just a celebration. I made a movie , "Genderblind", that features gyrls like me. One of our original and most influential models, Milon is now seasoned and has recently completed a highly successful runway show where she created an avenue to showcase LGBT community during Black Pride at a historic location, the DuSable Museum of African American History. Our own Brandee Young has been recently signed as a full-figured model. It is magnificent to see Jen's strange fruit, Hard Candy, take root and give seed to so much more than its original intent. It's all about growth... this is the Rise of the Stud. The Future is now.

Upon celebrating the seventh year of surviving the battle for my life, I feel healed..
We've made stars and had stripes..It is a revolution..gyrls like me are seen as we truly are..shining honestly..living free..

What's next... iono... enjoying the liberation..embracing the infinite possibilitites ...

Danielle Jones is currently starring in the movie Genderblind which is set to have it’s Atlanta GA premier September 4th, 2010

this past Sunday, Hard Candy Calendar had it’s first meet & greet for the models for the upcoming 2011 calendar. in our conversations, we got the basics: name. age. zodiac sign. but then the question was asked: “what’s your story?” we learned of students, actresses, models (of course), corrections officers and artists. then these beautiful womyn shared themselves and their stories of their connection with the Hard Candy cause: breast cancer. they spoke of family members, lovers and even first hand experience of surviving the disease. the entire meet was then transformed into a meeting of spirits. i became even more inspired, even more encouraged and even more motivated to work on this project. i must confess with my personal stresses, my motivation got a little muddy. over the years in talking about the project, i’ve presented numerous reasons for putting the calendar together. each year i added a new reason. but this year got a little dark. rumours and hate, money concerns, death and illness sent me 2 a bad place and i couldn’t create. my artistic vision became invisible. it was still there, i just couldn’t see it anymore. i was paralyzed by negativity. the project moved forward (thanx 2 Brandee) even as i stalled and held back. then the Universe stepped in (as always) and sent an amazing group of womyn 2 help me with my latest journey. i couldn’t believe how blessed i was to have these beautiful souls come together for this project.

in the past i never bothered to ask the models why they wanted 2 b a part of the calendar until this year. well, actually that was my faithful assistant’s idea (thanx Brandee, again). it’s not that i never cared b4, i just didn’t think so many would share my passion. actually, i just didn’t think. and because i didn’t think, we lost our reason for doing it last year. lost that focus. what was our motivation? was it just something to do? i didn’t realize the malaise that i had fallen into until i met these 2011 Future Studs (and femmes;)

my motivation has returned in full force. now i’m overflowing, almost overwhelmed with motivation and determination. i want so badly 2 serve these womyn well and present them in a way that truly represents their real beauty, grace and strength. they are fun, thoughtful, intelligent and creative bunch and i look forward to bringing our energies together to create another year of celebrating the stud.

Hard Candy is here for all the womyn who have been touched by breast cancer. we always have been and always will be. i can’t wait 2 start shooting these womyn. i am motivated 2 create this calendar by the battle with breast cancer. what’s your motivation 4 doin what u do?

Are You Femme Butch or Androgyn:

this quiz asks 10 simple questions that round up your entire self and then informs u of what u already know. duh!

Butch? or Femme?

simple name for a not so simple test. this one is more in depth. has 100 questions that pose insane hypotheticals, obvious stereotypes, and intriguing personality observations. some of the questions will have u wondering “what the hell does this have to do with my sexuality?!” yet at the same time cause u 2 stop and think about what it is specifically the type of road u like 2 walk on. there are literary questions. food questions. the quiz asks u about habits and routines. oh yeah and question 61. asks which snack are u. hard candy was my answer. ha!

if u’r like me all of these random questions could actually fascinate you. at some point u forget about the ’stud/femme’ thing and think about the ‘you’ thing. what exactly is it that makes me..’me’.

then u get to the end of the long ass quiz and u’r reminded that it’s about another label. but this isn’t so bad. it comes with numbers, stats, explanations and there’s even a chart! i like the more indepth discussion this quiz provides. it is far more accurate description than any quiz that i’ve taken but it still has 2 give u a label in order to give u an explanation. oh well, i think we’re stuck with them y’all.

p.s. in case anyone is interested here’s what my score said and it is me exactly:

SOFT ANDROGYNE
Your score placed you in the category of Soft Androgyne. This is the “steel magnolia” type. You may also wish to review Strong Femme and Androgyne, the two categories surrounding you. In a ranking across the femme/butch gamut, if 1 is femme and 100 is butch, you fall between 41 and 47 on the scale. For a review of where you fall in the overall population in numbers, refer to this chart. Your group is a large part of the 35-45 age group for the most part and has a wide mix of genders and orientations.

You enjoy a fairly strong butch for a partner, along the lines of a Feminist or Classic Butch, and take on other Androgynes as friends. Family is not terribly important to you, and odds are good you came from a home where that was not the primary issue. You may have a good, but distant relation with your family, or may not be in touch at all, but it’s pretty certain you don’t live with them unless you have to, or in the same city.

congrats you were the shit! the entire show was incredible. all of the models were awesome but Erica rose to the top to be the first Taking Over the Runway stud winner… and future Hard Candy Calendar feature model.

Along with Krissy for the femme model winner and Starr Studded as the winning designer, the show was unforgettable.

“Drag was originally a word used to describe the actual clothing actors wore on stage when they performed as women. As you no doubt learned by watching Shakespeare in Love, female roles used to be played not by actual females, but delicate young male actors. Even so, the term doesn’t actually date back to Shakespeare’s time. Instead, it came into popular usage during the age of British vaudeville shows when the cross-dressing was used for comic effect. The men would dress in drag and the women wore breeches as a theatrical method of satirizing the qualities unique to the opposite sex. It would not be until almost the middle of the 20th century that drag was specifically used as a term to describe female impersonators and this was also the era in which drag began to become more closely associated with homosexuality.”

so Bill S. didn’t come up with it. well at least according to this one unchecked source i found on the internet. another source of knowledge that we all must submit too;).

well at least that explanation helps me out a little bit cuz i thought the drag thing only referred to me, but of course there are drag kings as well as queens. soooo, what’s the difference between a drag king and a stud? while i know that being in drag is the full ASSumption of being a man and being a stud is still a woman who carries a masculine appearance. wow, that last sentence so over simplified my dominant sisters, it almost seems offensive. but y’all know i love ya. hell, i’m the unofficial #1 stud lover, so i’m really not tryin 2 b that way. sometimes, i don’t have the vocabulary 2 properly express my thoughts. so bear with me on this one.

despite that very simple distinction between the two, there is a whole spectrum of womyn that fall in between the drag king and the basic tomboy sporting baggy pants. there are womyn who relate more to male energy. so much so that they emote it. so wearing the clothes aren’t a conscious effort to become manly but more like a result of already being manly. chicken or the egg maybe? does it make a difference? i think it does.

in the end Mulan gets her man. she was just in drag. and how often (if at all, are str8 womyn drag kings?) mulan, didn’t relate 2 the boys at all. barely understood them. whereas i know studs that could walk amongst bio dudes and not miss a beat. have great conversations about sports, drink a beer and genuinely complain about womyn. fascinating. ever heard a stud talk about womyn as if they weren’t one? i hear it all the time. so it’s not drag for them. but then there are other studs who acknowledge their womanhood, only deal with womyn, and only seem 2 relate 2 womyn. r they in drag? do the clothes match what’s inside?

when it is just an outfit and when it is a manifestation of the inner person?

p.s. i like the end of the movie in which this male dominated society that treats womyn like second class citizens all bowed down to her for her heroic efforts. even the emperor bowed to Mulan.

Who says that culture and nightlife for Chicago’s queer women are dead? Certainly anyone crying into her beer over the recent closing of Andersonville watering hole Star Gaze. But not C.C. Carter, executive director of POW-WOW (Performers or Writers for Women on Women’s Issues), a female-fueled gathering of artists who meet weekly at South Side fixture Jeffrey Pub. “It’s kind of unfair that everything we do as LGBT happens on the North Side,” Carter says. “Everybody was very upset about Star Gaze closing, and yet Jeffrey Pub is there every Tuesday and it’s right off of Lake Shore Drive and the Metra line.”

The need for a greater awareness of queer cultural options for women of color on the South Side drove Carter to co-create the inaugural Chicago Women’s Pride 2010, a performing and cultural arts festival that kicks off Tuesday 2 at venues all over the city and happens throughout Women’s History Month.

The new fest includes a slam poetry competition every Tuesday in March at Jeffrey Pub; a kickoff fund-raiser on March 5 presented by B.Blyss! Productions; a production of Eve Ensler’s Any One of Us: Words from Prison at Northeastern University on March 12; a night of comedy at Bronzeville club Jokes & Notes on March 14; and the Rainbow Shoe/Tie Affair, a gala and awards ceremony on March 21. The fest will raise bucks for the building fund for Jackie’s Place, a temporary women’s housing shelter for victims of unemployment, sexual assault and domestic violence.

Carter, a professional spoken-word performer and onetime military brat who’s lived in Chicago for 15 years, was introduced to poetry by her grandmother, whom she calls “the fiercest spoken-word poet never known.” In junior high school, Carter won the 5th Annual Guild Complex Gwendolyn Brooks Spoken Word Competition. As an adult, while traveling the country performing spoken word, she noticed a dearth of friendly venues for queer women of color. “There weren’t a lot of spaces for LBT women artists interested in social justice and socially transformative work,” Carter says. “Even my friends who were the most prolific poets would water down their set when we were in certain kinds of audiences.”

In 2003, Carter cofounded POW-WOW as an ongoing cultural event for queer women of color and male allies, but she discovered that many of its followers were women in need. “My intent was to deal with the cultural-arts aspect of what was missing in the community,” Carter says, “but when you have a woman go on stage and talk about an incident that happened to her and then other women say, ‘Hey, this happened to me, too,’ suddenly I’m getting calls at two in the morning.” Now staffed by 200 volunteers, the org operates a 24-hour crisis hotline, offers workshops in the Juvenile Court Building and Dentention Center for girls and just launched Boys to Studs, a new program for gender-variant women.

Carter says she wants to give women a fest not dominated by men, such as Pride or Black Pride, while also bringing attention to the South Side. “There’s some phenomenal talent that’s not being recognized because of location and geography,” she says. “Bronzeville and Hyde Park are these up-and-coming areas that are vibrant with art and culture.” Yet the festival also has partnered with North Side events like the Chicago History Museum’s OUT at CHM on March 6 and Andersonville fixture Sappho’s Salon at Women & Children First on March 20.

The timing is no accident: Carter says the city still hasn’t figured out how to include lesbians in its Women’s History Month lineup. “I love the things the city puts out for Women’s History Month, but it lacks a lesbian focus,” she says. “The word lesbian is the elephant in the room for so many people.”

Chicago Women’s Pride 2010 kicks off Tuesday 2 at Jeffrey Pub.

Time Out Chicago / Issue 261 : Feb 25–Mar 3, 2010

Read more: http://chicago.timeout.com/articles/gay/83108/chicago-womens-pride-2010#ixzz0iXlP4e0n

Sarah Emma Edmonds aka Frank Thompson
American Civil War Soldier, Spy, Nurse

Emma Edmonds was one of approximately 400 women who succeeded in enlisting in the army (either Union or Confederate) during the Civil War. Her uniqueness is that she not only succeeded in remaining in the army for several years, but was also eminently successful as a Union spy-all while impersonating a man.

Emma was living in Flint, Michigan, when the first call for Union enlistments went out. She wanted to answer the call. So she cropped her hair, got a man’s suit of clothing, took the name of Frank Thompson and tried to enlist. It took her four tries but finally she did in fact get sworn into the Union Army (at that time the physical consisted merely of asking the enlistee questions-no medical examination). On April 25, 1861, Emma Edmonds alias Frank Thompson became a male nurse in the Second Volunteers of the United States Army.

After training in Washington, D.C., Emma’s unit was sent south to be part of McClellan’s campaign in Virginia. Private Thompson (Emma) was assigned as a male nurse to the hospital unit of the 2nd Michigan Volunteers and had no trouble in maintaining her masculine masquerade.

On 5 July 1884, a special act of Congress granted Emma Edmonds alias Frank Thompson an honorable discharge from the army, plus a bonus and a veteran’s pension of twelve dollars a month. The resulting Special Act of Congress read:
Emma lived out the rest of her life in La Porte, Texas, where she died on September 5, 1898. She is buried in the military section of Washington Cemetery in Houston, Texas. In honor of her duty and devotion to her country she is the only female member of the organization formed after the Civil War by Union veterans-The Grand Army of the Republic (GAR). In her own words Emma Edmonds said of her adventures: “I am naturally fond of adventure, a little ambitious, and a good deal romantic-but patriotism was the true secret of my success.”

Read her full story HERE

Cathay Williams was born in 1842 outside Independence, Missouri. Born into slavery she served as a house girl for a wealthy farmer. Things changed however when the Civil War started. Union soldiers would later take the plantation on which Cathay served. Several female servants, including Cathay, were taken to Little Rock, Arkansas to cook for the troops. Cathay dutifully served in this capacity, traveled with the army all around the South participating in all aspect of military life to the extent that a woman could. She was eventually sent to Washington to serve as cook and laundress for a general and his staff.

While with this general she was on the front lines with the troops as they raided the Shenandoah Valley and finally on to St. Louis for an extended stay. During this time, congress passed an act authorizing the establishment of the first all Black units of the military (two Calvary and two Infantry), later to become known as “Buffalo Soldiers”. In order to provide a living for herself and not be dependent on others, two very important principals to Cathay, she decided it was time to join the army.

In November of 1866 she enlisted in the 38th US Infantry as William Cathay”. Since there were little or no medical exams required, Cathay was able to successfully (at least initially), pull off this disguise. In an article about her in the St. Louis Times, Williams was described as ”tall and powerfully built.“
It is said that two others knew of her true identity, a cousin and a friend, but both loyally kept her secret.

During Cathay’s tour of duty, she performed assignments required of her fellow troops, such as learning to use a musket and guard duty. These skills were essential as her unit was soon deployed to Fort Curnmings in 1867. The 38 was sent to protect immigrants traveling one of the most dangerous routes to California at the time, Cooke’s Canyon. However, while at Fort Cummings, there was a mutiny among the troops. Several where brought up on charges or jailed. Cathay is not known to be among them. It did however take its toll on her spirit to serve and she decided it was time to get out.

She did so by reporting she was ill prompting an exam by the post surgeon. It was then her secret was discovered. Cathay Williams was honorably discharged on October 14, 1868 having made her place in history as the first female Buffalo Soldier to serve. (Excerpts taken from the West Texan Historian Society)