Women Alone
Elizabeth X
Are lesbians becoming extinct? Did we ever truly decide what it means to be a lesbian? The word itself doesn't sit still and has adopted various etymologies from Sappho's time to "The L Word." I'm not sure what the word means to me anymore, and I confess that is very unsettling. "Are lesbians going extinct?" sounds like the Carrie Bradshaw question that began every episode of Sex in the City. Am I a lesbian? Who is a lesbian? As Carrie's queer fictional twin, I want to skip the exploratory scenes, cut to the last voice-over before the credits roll, and hijack Virginia Woolf's statement: "Women, alone, stir my imagination." Can't it be that simple?
Regardless of whether lesbians are going extinct, the deeply felt focus of women alone stirring each others' imaginations is disappearing from lesbian social dynamics. Woolf's statement has radical implications beyond isolated cerebral activity; we thrive from sharing the same embodied space with each other, creating a collective imagination personally, socially, and politically. A decade deep into the technological revolution, we have unprecedented access to information and networks, yet we've become increasingly isolated individualists. Generation by generation, the shared act of re-envisioning becomes a praxis, the evolution of culture; so what does it mean that, for the first time in six million years, we are living a lesbian existence less with each other directly than via machines? If at one time we asked if our collective lesbian focus/consciousness was moving from the margins to an assimilated center, we might as well now ask if post-postmodernism has eliminated distinctions between a centralist paradigm and subcultures. Is it still possible to create and share a lesbian imagination in a diaspora of our own making?
Who are we? A woman who sleeps with another woman, a lipstick lesbian, a butch, a dyke, a woman married to a man who sleeps with women, a male in a female body who sleeps with a female, a female in a male body who sleeps with males in female bodies, an asexual biological female, a female who wishes she was sleeping with another female, or maybe even a five- year- old. Maybe all of these people identify as lesbians, and maybe none of them do. Does it matter?
We need another starting point. What happens if everyone keeps his or her pants on, and sex is out of the equation. What if we think in individual terms and then ask: is the lesbian spirit becoming extinct? Another big mess—what is a lesbian spirit? Are some of us born with it? Do some of us evolve into and out of it? In 1948, Kinsey postulated the majority of us are bisexual, and the dominant culture influences life choices. This is precisely why the issue is so sticky. Culture plays a significant role in determining individuals' subconscious decision-making and identity politics, even though for many of us, being a lesbian is not a choice.
The ladies are attending an opening (a photographic collection of drag kings) at Charlotte's art gallery. Samantha comments, "I bet being a drag king would be fun." Miranda quips, "Oh, please, I have enough trouble figuring out how to be a woman in a man's world, without trying to be a woman pretending to be a man in a man's world." Charlotte introduces the artist, Bared. "What inspired you to do this?" Miranda asks. Bared replies, "I feel we have dual powers in each of us. Men can be very female, and women can be very male. Gender is an illusion," turning to Charlotte, "sometimes a very beautiful illusion."
Later, after Carrie discovers her current boyfriend is bisexual, she muses, "If women can transform into men, and men can become women, and we can choose to sleep with everyone, then maybe gender doesn't even exist anymore. If we can take the best of the other sex and make it our own, has the opposite sex become obsolete?"
–from Sex in the City, "boy, girl, boy, girl"
Fiction, of course, is one thing. Bared can benignly assert "gender is an illusion" and all the characters involved struggle to incorporate their masculine and feminine sides, but it's a relatively safe struggle carried out within heterosexual norms, without serious consequences. In real life, gender fluidity can be a much more dangerous proposition.
The panic brought on by realizing I was a lesbian was many years preceded by the panic of feeling I was a different species. What could have been a normal six-year-old birthday was instead another personal catastrophe. In less than a year, my brother, a friend, a friend's mother, and my cat died. Mortality and identity had been forced into the spotlight early in life. After my brother's burial, as people scattered, my mother took me aside to explain my brother was now in the ground next to my grandfather. Then she explained that she and my father would be buried to the left of the family stone, and my other brother and his future wife would be buried to the right of the stone. The obvious question was where would I be buried? She responded, "with your future husband of course." I immediately said, "Well what if I do not want a husband? What will happen to me?" I do not remember what she said. Probably somewhere in the textbook on child development, it's written that birthdays are perfect occasions for re-establishing normalcy, and god knows we needed some, so my mother threw a party.
In my mind, there was nothing normal about a home filled with squeaky girls I hardly knew from school. At least my best friends who lived in our circle of Baltimore row houses were there, David and Mathew. We all had dinner and cake, but sometime shortly after, it was announced Mathew and David had to go home. If I had known how to curse then, it would have probably gone something like this: "You make me hang out with all those bitchy girls from school, and thank god Mathew and David are here, and now they have to go home? What is the point of having a goddamn sleep-over birthday party if my best friends are not allowed to stay?" My mother offered some kind of explanation as to why, something about inappropriateness, then went back to the girls who were still squealing about one thing or another. And then it happened.
I crouched in a corner of the kitchen, heard the other girls carrying on in another part of the house, happy as clams, and the thud of the front door closing as David and Mathew went home. I felt like a complete outsider at my own birthday party. The only recourse was to go downstairs and sit in my father's lap. He was watching M.A.S.H in what we would now term the man cave. I don't think he said much, but that was probably the most comforting thing of all. We both could hear the running back and forth above, and escape the craziness. I do remember wanting to ask him, wanting him to explain to me why Mathew and David had to leave, why those crazy girls could stay, and who was I, then? When M.A.S.H was over he said I needed to go back upstairs. Anyway my mother soon came looking for me, and gave a lecture about being a bad hostess.
The next morning, all the girls were doing each other's hair. As soon as they left, I went outside and rode bikes with the boys. In that moment, I felt synoptically that I was not like either tribe: I was not entirely in the world of Mathew, or David, or Ian, my other buddy, and despite my willingness to try hair styling, I was nothing like the other girls. I remember going over and over this in my head, while we went over and over the concrete sidewalk slabs on our bikes, as if I could pedal myself into the answer.
I never liked dresses. My mother was crafty, and on the best of days, could be convinced to go with the flow. She had made me three vests to match with splendid trousers, and when I wore them I felt unstoppable, like my father when he left for work in the morning. I would watch him lather up the horsehair brush in his mug, run the razor across his neck and chin, taking notes in my mind for what I would do when I was his age. I'd get ready for school in my room while his shower water was running, wait for it to stop, wait ten minutes, and knock on the door so I wouldn't miss the tie-tying routine. Even with the mishap birthday party close in mind, I could not comprehend that my body was not a miniature version of his body. I had caught on that my brother and I had slight differences, mainly that he cried a lot, oh, and the penis. But in my mind, our bodies were the same and as we each grew up, we would grow into bodies that fit us.
I started taking swimming lessons at the Howard Johnson hotel down the road. The first day I packed my gear bag and walked down, got dressed in the locker room, and came out to the edge of the pool with my bottoms on, sans top. I did not understand that girls' nipples had to be covered, and boys' nipples did not, and I swear on anyone's grave, I honest to goodness did not know which I had to do—to cover or not to cover—for swimming lessons. I was sitting at the edge of the pool like the other participants, and realized in the eyes of the instructor I had made a major mistake. I was called out. I will never forget that day either. The instructor went on with the lesson—getting our heads underwater and counting to five—but I couldn't get over the fact that I had chosen wrong, that what it came down to is that I was a partially nude female, not a perfectly fine male. That particular day that I realized my body belonged in one category, even as the rest of me did not.
We moved south. After school, I'd ride bikes with the Murtha brothers and Jeff. My father bought me a small hammer and together we built a tree-house. He also bought me my first mitt. By third grade I had found a new posse, Stacey, who was like me, and our gorgeous counter-part Kenyatta. In hindsight I can understand the magic of this triumvirate: we were outsiders, the two tomboys (whatever that means) and the one African-American in the racist south. I was separated from them in middle school. Neighborhoods determined what school you were funneled to, and I was stuck with the waspy weirdoes.
By sixth grade, my whole sense of self unraveled. I couldn't conceal my breasts anymore, then there was the issue of bleeding and all the equipment and planning that went along with it. Not to mention, cramps were tough from day one. In physical education class, girls and boys were separated. Gone were the days of playing with the boys. On top of all that, we were now expected to shower after class. Some lesbians reflect back on this period with wild stories of watching the other girls get naked. I felt like an imposter. Most girls felt perfectly fine being naked around each other, I even saw two girls kissing, and when another girl wanted to try because she wanted a boyfriend, it all made sense. This is what girls do: they practice kissing each other before they have boyfriends in just the same way I practiced along with the boys because I would have a girlfriend. I kept these thoughts—confusing, terrifying, hopeful—to myself.
I made some sort of peace with my identity, my body, my spirit. Instead of perceiving myself as not female and not male, I saw myself as both. It seems like a subtle difference, but it wasn't inside my eleven-year-old head. It was a private, profound realization that I no longer had to feel split; even while the world was dividing us up into two groups, and to some extent I had to go along with that, I didn't have to choose inside. Of course I had no vocabulary or any real sense of what all this meant. It wasn't necessary, I could just be. Two-spirited in one body.
I met Jennifer who had recently moved to the neighborhood. We instantly became best buddies, and she was my first crush. We tried out for a game show together in Richmond, and later that evening, after her mother drove us back to their place, we got ready for bed. I had brought along my sleeping bag, yet Jennifer imperatively announced "you will sleep with me." I was dumbfounded. I liked her, a lot. For the first time I understood why David and Mathew had to leave…and how, in fact, in reality, I should not be sleeping in a bed with Jennifer! I wasn't completely her opposite, but I knew it felt perfect kissing her. I asked her if she was practicing. "For what?" she asked. "For a boyfriend," I mumbled. She looked at me and said "I'm not practicing for anything. I'm kissing you." That is the moment, right there. I felt completely in love/lust with another person who felt the same way about me, all of me. Soon after, her father was transferred, and she moved away at the end of the school year.
If it could happen once, I assumed it could happen again. However, by that time, the pressures of guilt and shame were coming at me from outside. In addition, girls were getting meaner and stranger. I had two gal pals, Rebecca and Lacy, and that was enough. Boys were becoming more aggressive; it was impossible now to interact with them androgynously. Blame it all on hormones. I needed a new game plan: research. I obsessively read everything I could find to understand what in fact I was, and spent study halls and lunch periods in the library. In a maze of old encyclopedias I looked up sex and followed all the tag lines until I read the word homosexual. Then I read the word "invert." Who knows how old the reference books were, but there was some line in there about whether or not inverts were curable. For the first time, I was scared. Then I discovered an article on Martina Navratilova and Billy Jean King in a current magazine, and somehow decided that it was going to be okay if I was an invert, because it seemed they were, too. I would escape as soon as I could, and go find "my people."
I lived in a very conservative neighborhood outside of Richmond, Virginia with a politically-entangled father and a mother who could swing both ways: she encouraged my independence and autonomy, as long as it didn't threaten the façade of family or tenets of the Southern Baptist church. The small world around me—like a constant drone through a bullhorn—said over and over that homosexuality was wrong. I knew I had to make a hard, strategic decision to disguise who I was in public in order to survive long enough to get out. In hindsight, I know that decision, sometime around Christmas in 1988, was the only viable choice I had, yet I also know it was one of the most painful ones in my life. It's not that I didn't accept my truth; I accepted that I was a two-spirited person in a female body, and that I was attracted to other females, but I had to succumb to the pressure to appear one way on the outside in order to survive.
Once again, just like at my first grade birthday party, I had a sense of hope in a future I did not know, but trusted would come. And then proceeded to date many boys. Strangely enough, it worked out for the next three years. Wrestlers, football players, a cross-country runner, a swimmer. They all were quite similar to each other: very sensitive hearts, body-focused, disciplined, and…as it turned out, some were bisexual. At the time, again, there was no vocabulary running around our part of the southern-conservative woods to explain what we were doing, or why. We just did. In part, the biggest taboo was pregnancy, so it made perfect sense that what we engaged in was more homosexual than heterosexual. We were making do with what we had in a world where at least we looked normal publicly.
At home, I could do anything, stay out until all hours if I was with a boy. If not, the curfews came down. I could not mow the lawn; I was to wash the dishes. Anytime I exerted myself as a young feminist, I felt the air thicken, mostly by my mother, though even my father had changed a lot since my pre-pubescent years. He was under considerable stress with many things, though I will not make excuses for him. We butted heads constantly, and several times I saw the crazy look in his eye and his hand would go up, as if I would get the beating of my life. I never did, but he did lose it once and hit me hard in the jaw. What was really at stake was losing my ally of the moment.
The only time I really felt my mother was pleased with me was the night I announced I would be attending Ricky's junior prom the following week. The dress, the shoes, the French hosiery with the seam stripe up the back, and then the hair, the make-up. I hated the whole thing, but more than that, I didn't know what to make of the fact that my mother was having the time of her life. It crossed my mind, this is that first- grade birthday party all over again! Hells bells! Ricky arrived with the flowers and mom whipped out the camera and then fussed over how I should pin the corsage on his lapel, the camera snapping. He had his arm around me. He knew, in his own 17-year old male way, that I was a wild stallion who now had been officially broken…by her mother. He had never wanted to break my spirit, none of the guys did. We didn't talk about it, as we drove away, or at dinner at the Hotel Jefferson, or when we arrived at the prom, or when we left after fifteen minutes and drove back to his place. His parents were away, and we ate gummy bears in his kitchen, and he gave me some of his clothes to change into.
That night, which started as the worst awakening thus far—the American equivalent of mother-to-daughter foot-binding—ended with an equally profound awakening, thanks to one boy-man's strong intuition. He wanted to show me "The Hunger." It wasn't until many years later that I actually saw how the movie ended, because as my eyes were popping out of my head watching the mesmerizing seduction of Susan Sarandon, Ricky announced that he would be Catherine Deneuve. That moment, that night, is really my big coming out story, and it was with a guy. It was the first time that I really connected to my sense of femaleness in a sexual way through lesbian role-play. I owe a debt of gratitude to all the guys back then, especially to him. I was not as kind as I should have been, not as considerate or as gentle as I should have been with their hearts. I regret that.
Anger came next. Now that I had the all the pieces to my puzzle, there was nowhere to go. I resented the boys I spent time with and they knew it. I did the normal things people do when they are miserable with their life choices and are circumstantially powerless to make necessary changes. I drank, did drugs, buried myself in school and overachieving, got a job to get out of the house, pretty much ran myself ragged trying to avoid having to sit with my own feelings. I couldn't talk to anyone about being gay. I did find the gay bar downtown, Babes, a safe watering hole where it was easy to drink, but the women all seemed weird; I didn't see Catherine Deneuve there, or anyone else who made me look twice. There were bimbo-looking women with big hair, and the meanest toughest bulldykes imaginable. There was one woman who would hang out with me, in a big sister kind of way. She said I should focus on college, that I would meet someone my age and the world would open up.
I was on a mission, and devised a big ruse for the colleges I wanted to visit, all up north. I drove my mother and brother all around New England, but I was only interested in Northampton, home of Lesbianville, USA, and Smith College. My interview went fine, yet the school itself was small, homogenized, and reminded me of my high school. Umass was around the corner in Amherst; it was big, diversified, and they had a small but inspiring gay population with its own dorm. Back in Virginia, senior year, a newfound purpose: get out as soon as possible. My mother was catching on, especially after she read in the university literature about the GLB 2-in-20 dorm floor, and coincidently made it clear that I would go to a school instate. As the acceptance letters rolled in, she upped the ante; if I was going to school out of state, I'd have to pay for it myself.
I took on three jobs. I worked hard, played hard, and picked up a book someone from Babes recommended: How to Come Out to Your Parents. I accepted UMass's offer; my grandmother bought my train ticket for early freshman orientation. I was so close to freedom! One week from when I was to leave for school, my mother went through my drawers and found a copy of the how-to book next to a bottle of whiskey, and within two days, the paddy wagon came and took me away. Lockdown for thirty days in a place called of all things Serenity Lodge. I was told that I was an alcoholic with a gender identity disorder. I was drugged with meloril and had two seizures from it. I paid a very high price for the chance of freedom—the chance to get the hell out of the south. Maybe it was the drugs they had me doped up on, but part of me gave up then. I was losing everything I had worked so hard for. The only thing redeeming about the experience was meeting two wonderful women; we would support each other through it. This is when I learned, at ground zero, what feminism can be; how women support each other like an underground railroad.
After release, my mother reassured me, saying she had taken care of UMass and cancelled my admissions. And by the way, maybe I should live with my aunt and go to school around there. I didn't have the same spirit or determination anymore. We had an argument in December, ending in me saying adamantly I would go to UMass for the January semester and if she tried to stop me, I would simply vanish. I don't know what happened behind the scenes, but my only living grandparent, my maternal grandmother who had purchased the first train ticket, bought another, and this time my mother didn't stop me. I made it to school, finally, and three months later my grandmother died. Two weeks before, she wrote me a note. She knew. It was ok. But I had lost my only familial ally, and now, beyond a doubt, was 100% on my own.
School was ok. I enjoyed most of my classes, and I learned a great deal about lesbians. I had found my people, but something more substantial was missing. I looked everywhere. It all seemed petty and juvenile, the same shallow physicality that I experienced with guys. I wanted to feel connection. I wanted to feel the same thrill as I had with Jennifer in middle school, with an added sexual maturity. Then one day, someone special caught my eye and I caught hers. She introduced me to her nontraditional friends with whom I instantly felt a kinship. Everything was falling into place. I really didn't have time to be a footloose 18-22-year-old; I was working full time, and also, in a sense, if you have fought so hard to get somewhere, it's rather impossible to fall in with collegiate anything-goes-party-hard-and-get laid.
Part of the terms of my release from Serenity Lodge, and what I think was a deal my grandmother made with my mother, is that I would go to therapy. I didn't mind, it was the only thing my mother would pay for, and somehow that made me feel like she cared, or maybe even that she was sorry. I learned a great deal, and for the most part it felt non-confrontational. I made a series of mistakes though, by letting down my guard and spilling the beans about dating a special woman, and how I really didn't think I was a drug addict or gender- confused, and that maybe we should stop these weekly sessions. Jesus god, within minutes the world was spinning again, she had my mother on the phone and I was like a doe in the headlights. I remember calling Anna and telling her they were trying to lock me up again. She said they can't do that now, you are not a minor, and proceeded to list my legal rights. I don't know why I didn't fight. Oh I wish I had. It was like the third alternative to fight or flight when you become motionless, frozen, a kind of misdirected neurological response to overwhelming stress.
The next day I was locked up again. And drugged again. This time with certifiably scary crazy people. There are many uncomfortable things I learned there that I wish I didn't know. Again, it was hard to put the pieces together in that haze, and still hard to put them together now. What I can say is that even in 1993, professionals, when co-coerced by family members, did what they could to break the spirit of strong women and re-route them to heterosexuality. There were times when I thought perhaps the straight women are the lucky ones, to have escaped this life. It was like a prison, really. Bars on the windows, metal lockdown sliding doors, tunnels underground. They drug you so it's hard to get your bearings.
The plight to stay alive, to hold on to your sense of self under immense pressures for such a long time, for what seemed like a lifetime, takes its toll. I got out of there one day before the fall semester was starting, and hadn't even enrolled in my courses. I raced around and caught myself up. That last experience made me so sad, it took awhile to find my footing again. I knew deep down I was having to make a choice, that accepting myself would mean that my family did not accept me at all. Moreover, they could never be trusted, even from 600 miles away. This was the mad irony. I accepted myself, loved myself for who I was, a two-spirited person in a female body, and this was wrong. An illness. A disorder.
There was something communal, magical, light about those years, autumn of 1993-1997 in the Pioneer Valley. I was surrounded by amazing women in their 30s—like having a dozen big sisters. I was studying biology and philosophy in school, but learned from them about the women's movement, gay and lesbian history, women's rights, politics. They called me a "baby butch," and I really did not know what that meant, but it felt okay. I knew I was a feminist, a lesbian, and I felt at home inside and in the world.
I was together with Anna during that time. What began as a passionate affair quickly turned to another sort of co-existence. We were the best of friends who happened to have sex sometimes. I maintained a separate apartment, even though we spent nights together. It's what I needed. She needed me to return to the same bed every night, and I did. We separated when it was clear at one point that we each needed different things. It wasn't easy, letting go of the best relationship I had known, letting go of the familiarity, the rituals of our lives. But it was peaceful. I was happy to see her happy when she found someone who could love her the way she wanted to be loved. Most of the women in that core group had moved out west, or were moving away. I moved further north.
By 1999, the landscape of gay rights and politics was changing. From what I could see, segregated gender roles were making a comeback and at the same time, the tranny movement was gaining momentum; conservatism was creeping in. At first I didn't notice. In the community, people seemed to be buckling down into the butch-fem model again in ways I found limiting. In Vermont, where I had been living for the past two years, the fight for civil unions was underway and it was a vicious, hateful time. There was a push within the community to shape up, mirror the heterosexuals so we can get the rights we deserve. Everybody couple up; have a kid, rent a kid, whatever; look upstanding. On the other side, the social conservatives were plastering their bumpers with stickers that read: Kill a Queer, not a Deer and Mom and Dad, not Steve and Brad. I was working in the commercial and industrial construction field; it was a hateful environment for a woman who would not allow others to sexualize her, and would not participate in degrading other women, either. I developed a clan-group of sorts with a handful of guys who were necessary protectors. Still, the only way to earn the respect of 250 pound men is to do what they do, only faster and better. When you weigh 115 pounds, it's quite a feat to haul 105 pounds up three flights of stairs, day in and day out. But these are things you have to do in order to gain their respect as a person, a co-worker, and not as a woman who must have had to do sexual favors for the boss in order to get the job. Thank god at some point brains were allowed to trump brawn, and I did the punch list, went in after the job was finished and communicated with the GC, architects, other foremen, to correct mistakes.
At some point, I believe it was 2001, we had to sign an agreement stating we would not discuss our salaries. Howard Dean had lost the governor's race because of his support for civil unions, and there was a backlash from the new Douglas Administration. They were trying to dissolve the Governor's Commission on Women which had been pushing an "equal pay for equal work" bill, and here, right in the thick of it, we had to sign a gag order at work saying we would not discuss our pay. I broke it one day when some new kid was put on my site, some cokehead fresh out of prison. He was making more than me, and I had years with the company and foreman experience. I was aghast. I left soon after and became my own subcontractor. Previously, when we had annual reviews, I earned a 50- cent wage increase. When I found out my peers of equal standing had received $1.50 an hour increase, I asked the owner why I didn't. They have families to support. You understand.
There are a gazillion hidden privileges that come along with identifying as male, regardless of one's vocation or profession. I had met very few women in all the large job sites I had been on, but oddly enough, more than a dozen FtMs. They were much colder to me than the men were, I figure because they thought I might blow their cover. Ironically, they had the more expensive carharts and insulated boots, newer trucks. They were not paid 73 cents on the dollar.
I was 27 in 2001. Bush was in office, 9-11 happened; Howard Dean ousted, Jim Douglas in; lesbians and gay men were assimilating; on the fringes, the transgender movement was further undefining the denotative definition of transgender, "across, beyond, on or to the other side of" gender, into a new body politic which more often than not implied a (certain) divorce from one's corporeal identity. For biological females, the undercurrent of anti-femaleness was hard to ignore. In my own case, it was a pressure from lovers, and peers as well, asserting the same kind of pigeonholing I experienced growing up. I was a lesbian because I was female and slept with other females, but I was not a fem or a butch, which was beginning to disqualify me from the circle. Even if I identified as a two-gendered person, now I had to deny my femaleness in order to "qualify." I have not always understood my body as it looks in the mirror, but I love it for being "me." Nonetheless, by 2001, to identify as transgender meant you bound your chest, packed at home if not also in public, and above all else, didn't feel. Girls have feelings, they process, they hang out together. Lovers expected you would always be strapping it on, and objectifying them the way men do. Drink beer from a bottle. Grow all your hair. We, the truly transgendered, were pushed to be male-identified, instead of holding on to a sense of a gender continuum. It took a bit of time to really put my finger on what was going on.:In print media, columnists were calling feminism "the f word," academics were writing about postfeminism, and the LGBT community separated, in spirit, from the fundamental principle: women are people, too. Beyond a reasonable doubt, third-wavers—gen-x and gen-y—guided the psychic-spiritual shift.
My concept of "my people," my familiars, began to shift to a mixed bag of sexual orientations, ages, and affiliations. The things we had in common were critical thinking, women's rights, free will, an examined life, a sense of democracy, art, creative expression. Sexual orientation and gender became a mute point. A sense of humanity and feminism was forefront. I had little in common with my peer group who all seemed especially caught up in playing house and having babies, or on the other hand, switching personal pronouns and/or taking testosterone. Around this time, I was at a party, bored out of my mind, reading a magazine, when I heard a voice exclaim from across the room, "Oh I loved Antonia's Line!" I looked up at the mention of one of my favorite all-time movies, and there she was. As she has re-told the story many times, she had been watching me, instantly attracted, that wild phenomenon we sum up in one phrase, from across a crowded room.
From that point onward, it is a long, magical, inspiring, and heartbreaking six-year tale which can be summed up as pivoting around one truth: never before had either of us so deeply connected with another. When the friendship moved into physical intimacy, there was a purity to that moment, reminiscent of Jennifer, and Anna, only now deeper, more complex, more beautiful. It was the first time as an adult that I had been filled with all-encompassing, I mean all-encompassing awe towards another. Aside from that, it was also the first time someone saw me for all of me—for every facet of my being, not just what they wanted to see. Ray didn't ask me to be more female. She didn't ask me to be more male. Her running joke was that she wasn't a lesbian, but an Elizabethan. And for some reason this still cracks me up, the most simple and clever way to say, I love all of you for you. She was on the Governor's Commission on Women, and an active member of the local NOW chapter, so there were a lot of functions to attend. The question would come up, how did you two meet? And Ray would say, "at a salon on the west bank of Paris. It was 1921, or 1922, I can't remember exactly. It was quite a long time ago." Then she'd smile at me, and whoever asked the question would be mildly confused. And who knows, maybe she was right all along. We knew each other instantly in ways that supersede logic.
That said, I don't think any two people could have fallen in love under more trying circumstances. Aimée and Jaguar, yes. It was hard, and put us both through the sort of trials no one should have to go through. Ultimately, she couldn't embrace herself. She was being pummeled from all sides, from her eldest daughter, from her friends who, once they found out we were lovers and not platonic friends, chastised her. Her "best friend's" husband, a dark-ages Freudian psychoanalyst, wanted to "un-gay" her, her ex-husband was trying to destroy her, and then, well, there is the issue of small-town gossip. It was horrendous. I did everything I could to protect her and failed. I believe she did everything she possibly could to hold on to herself, but it was too hard. I know in my heart of hearts, had the community we lived in not been so utterly critical, mean-spirited and haplessly blood-thirsty (to destroy someone else's happiness, to destroy love,) our story would have taken another route. I know this because there was never a time, once the doors were closed, we didn't feel passionately, compassionately, in love with each other—until the very end, those last three weeks when it was impossible to close the doors anymore. There was no solace, no shelter. With reservation, I can accept her choices, understanding the duress under which her decisions were made.
I can hear the gavels pounding from my own peanut gallery, the friends who had to witness my side of the pain and didn't understand my choice to stay as long as I did. To them I say, yes, I went down with the ship, but—there are things that only lovers know.
Ray forced me to really learn and understand what it's like to love someone for who they are, not who you want them to be. I have missed her when I am deeply happy. I have missed not sharing with her, Look! See the way the ferns are moving before the storm… I have missed the way she'd curl up around me, and sleep with her head on my chest, the way we were animals—something beyond language, definition, beyond categorical—natural, innocent, and carnal all rolled into one. I am lucky to have experienced it once in a lifetime. Some people never do. The rest is too difficult to understand.
After processing the loss, I threw out all previous notions of sexuality and identity and started over from scratch. I officially lost my virginity at 33, and it was officially boring and incompatible. Then I decided to try the faggot world again, and that was interesting, but not impressionable. Then I spent some time with another butch-fem hybrid who was lacking on all fronts non-sexual. Then another transgender grrl who, oddly enough, was a great match except for the pressure to play house, and hark! yet again, her internalized misogyny, projected on me. Not my cup of tea. Last, a high-femme, and high hopes, but no—instead, more bids for suburban picket fences and kids. I did the rounds, a kind of barometric check-in.
It was everywhere—this bizarre urge in women (and men), straight, bisexual, transgender, lesbian, between the ages of 25 and 40, to couple up and produce offspring. Some were single and already had a child, or children, and others made it loud and clear any venture down the dating path would lead to building and expanding a nest. Was it a response to current socioeconomics? Had we passed over into complete assimilation from fighting for partner benefits and the freedom to marry? Or could it be all of these factors with biology added in? What was driving the mayhem, and why was I becoming the tunnel-visioned target for single women under the age of 40? Has everybody forgotten art? Music? Poetry? Friendship?
"While women are certainly no strangers to faking it—we've faked our hair color, cup size, hell, we've even faked fur—I couldn't help but wonder, has fear of being alone suddenly raised the bar on faking? Are we faking more than orgasms? Are we faking entire relationships? Is it better to fake it than be alone?" Later Carrie wonders if maybe she was faking being happily single. But no, after a large dose of self-inquiry she stands in front of a newsstand while the vendor stares at her, with what, she assumes, is pity. "Pity from the man that sells me my Marlboro lights. It was the final straw. I decided I wouldn't let a magazine, my friends, or the surgeon general stop me from being who I was: single and fabulous! Exclamation point!"
–from Sex in the City, "They shoot single people, don't they?"
In straight America, women experience rising pressure to marry and have children by the time they are 25, though subtle and not-so-subtle conditioning happens long before. Nowadays it seems lesbians and straight women have similar behavior patterns. We are all female after all, right? Are our bodies just as geared to perpetuating the species as our heterosexual sisters? Do all lesbians hear the make-a-baby call? Hell no. In fact, if there was ever a case to be made for the complexity of lesbian spirit, it's right now, right here. In 2010, all things are possible for the breeding public; even FtM's deliver babies. Yet something critical is disappearing from the category of choices. As someone who has been in different relationships involving co-parenting in the past, I wonder why gaining social acceptance, among lesbians in my age bracket, and in the culture at large, now involves family-oriented lesbian relationships at the expense of other alternative choices: the choice to be single, the choice to be polyamorous, the choice to be asexual, the choice to define for ourselves how relationships can look and feel. The lesbian spirit has, at its crux, a fierce need for integrity. We need to be free to define for ourselves our own sexualities and modes of expression, without reference to cultural expectations and corresponding privileges.
"By midnight, Charlotte discovered Manhattan's latest group to flaunt their disposable income—the power lesbian. They seemed to have everything—great shoes, killer eyewear, and the secrets to invisible make-up…Power Lesbians and their shoes are like Wall Street brokers and their cigars." Charlotte is immediately drawn into the power lesbian world, and plans to accompany her new friend, Lydia, on a ski trip. First, though, she must pass muster with the lesbian 'queen bee,' an ex-wife of a Hollywood executive.
Patty Asten confronts Charlotte: "Before we all get on a plane together, there's something everyone wants to know. Are you gay?" Charlotte innocently and enthusiastically explains, "No. No I'm not. But I do so enjoy the company of all these women. Everyone is so smart, and funny. I've been spending way too much time and attention on men. It feels like such a safe and warm environment. And while sexually, I feel that I am straight, there's a very powerful part of me that connects to the female spirit."
Patty retorts, "Sweetheart, that's all very nice, but if you're not going to eat pussy, you're not a dyke." Charlotte is banished.
–from Sex in the City, "The Cheating Curve"
I found myself much in the position of Charlotte last year. I was at a potluck birthday party for a dear friend. She is not a power lesbian and neither is her partner. Neither was another couple I knew as acquaintances, though they might secretly aspire to be. The rest of the guests—all couples—were serious power lesbians, as were the hosts. So there I was, single, childless, and in a not-for-profit not-for-power, social services occupation in the company of attorneys and doctors acting like they were straight out of the aforementioned episode of Sex in the City. They were classist. They treated their nanny like a subservient domestic worker; they treated their kid like a trophy, making play dates with the other trophy kids of other couples. They were coldly materialistic. Someone volunteered I should throw my jacket into the smoldering fire because plastic starts a good flame (hello, the jacket is Brazilian leather, extra shiny, and who burns plastic anyway?) They were heterosexist. I was asked, "Anyone special?" followed by how easy it is to find good sperm donors, and worst-case scenario, adoption has less hurdles for lesbian couples than it once did. Clearly my lesbian membership card had been denied, again, and I had no intention of meeting the latest checklist to obtain one.
Later that evening, I went over to another friend's house down the street from the party. She had not been invited—she is straight. We were sitting outside in wicker chairs, under the stars, and I told her some of the things they had said to me. I wanted to check-in—get feedback from the "other side" about it. Was I over-reacting? Had the Emily Post manual been updated recently? In fact, she was if anything more insulted than I was. Spending time with her was another reminder that I have more friendships with heterosexual women than lesbians, because I feel accepted by them and often judged by the lesbians of my generation. The straights have become the new progressive. The women in Sex in the City have a profound respect for each other's differences, and even when they don't understand each other, their commitment to each other's well being is paramount. Is it easier for them because they are all heterosexual? Because they don't have to deal with the drama of physically intimate relationships with each other? Undoubtedly yes; however, this show has a gazillion things to teach us about the value of mutual respect, tolerance, loyalty, and sisterhood—what some lesbians have forgotten. If we are heading towards extinction, this might be one of the reasons why. We tell people like Charlotte she's not "allowed in our club," but inside the club, we sometimes do not treat each other with the dignity Charlotte, Carrie, Samantha, and Miranda have for each other.
It's gotten so that I could imagine myself tweaking Charlotte's statement to make the point. Let's say I'm at a hetero-only female gathering, someone asks are you straight? I reply: "No. No I'm not. But I do so enjoy the company of all these women. Everyone is so smart, and funny. I've been spending way too much time and attention on [lesbians]. It feels like such a safe and warm environment. And while sexually, I feel that I am [not straight], there's a very powerful part of me that connects to the female spirit." Now admittedly it did happen with Ray's friends; however, at no other time in my adult life has a straight queen bee retorted, "Sweetheart, that's all very nice, but if you're not going to [suck dick], you're not [one of us]." The straight women don't require a membership card!
On the other hand, it's a bit disconcerting to have spent a lifetime, and onwards, trying to find a place where I belong, with people like me, and find it doesn't exist in the way I imagined five, ten, twenty, thirty years ago. Our communities have changed, for better or worse. The second place I was institutionalized now offers--seventeen years later—a special program for LBGT people to accept their sexuality and facilitate healing and understanding between family members. My parents joined a small PFLAG group at their Baptist church, even though the emphasis is on supporting gay and lesbian adult children with Christian values. And luckily, for some homosexual couples who married and later divorced, there is a legal framework in place to guard equality and just proceedings. But these examples of social progress only benefit lesbians who fit within, or aspire to, traditional family frameworks. Judging from the recent surge in bullying, teen suicides and the like, it doesn't seem to have become that much easier for individuals who stand out in U.S. society. (And yet it is those of us on the outskirts who often express what otherwise goes unimagined, unseen, unrealized in the culture.)
Virginia Woolf captured the transgendered lesbian spirit in Orlando, which was written for Vita Sackville-West, her lover at the time, and was called (by Vita's son Nigel Nicolson) "the longest love letter in the English language." It is the hallmark of what any long lesbian love letter might be, full of seriousness and playfulness, inside jokes and musings, affection, lust, awe, and beyond all that it's a subversive vision where Virginia re-wrote the rules for Vita. She changed the laws of government, time, space, and history, so as to express Vita's identity as holistic and free, and give the rest of us the thrilling possibility that women in love with women could revolutionize the world. Precisely because we could be unbound to custom or definition; because we could choose and transform the lives we lived.
The women I hang out with today are lesbian, straight, bisexual, asexual; of different ethnicities; of different ages. They are social workers, nurses, administrators, attorneys, disabled, educators, artists, writers, stay-at-home mothers, graphic designers, urban planners, landscapers, biochemists, caregivers, musicians. All of them have a certain feminist energy; all of them refuse to blindly follow the patriarchal manual.
That said, I know there is still something unique when lesbians share the same space. When we gather for chat, or dinner, or a function, the air is different. Not always, but often enough to remind me that we share certain understandings. And I still want to believe when two lesbians share the crossroads of love and lust, something other-worldly happens. We have an opportunity to embody a wholly lesbian-identified pro-creation.
Are lesbians going extinct? Did we ever decide on what it means to be a lesbian? Virginia Woolf was married to Leonard Woolf. Her associates consisted of as many men as women. Yet, her closest, most intimate, sometimes sexual, relationships were with women. She had no children of her own, but was a critical influence in the rearing of her sister Vanessa's children, and Vita Sackville-West's sons. It seems somewhat inaccurate to call Virginia Woolf a lesbian, even though historically it has been important. What I do know is women alone stirred her imagination. As long as this feeling, this sheer expression of heart and soul exists within and between women, lesbians are in no danger of extinction.
Regardless of whether lesbians are going extinct, the deeply felt focus of women alone stirring each others' imaginations is disappearing from lesbian social dynamics. Woolf's statement has radical implications beyond isolated cerebral activity; we thrive from sharing the same embodied space with each other, creating a collective imagination personally, socially, and politically. A decade deep into the technological revolution, we have unprecedented access to information and networks, yet we've become increasingly isolated individualists. Generation by generation, the shared act of re-envisioning becomes a praxis, the evolution of culture; so what does it mean that, for the first time in six million years, we are living a lesbian existence less with each other directly than via machines? If at one time we asked if our collective lesbian focus/consciousness was moving from the margins to an assimilated center, we might as well now ask if post-postmodernism has eliminated distinctions between a centralist paradigm and subcultures. Is it still possible to create and share a lesbian imagination in a diaspora of our own making?
Who are we? A woman who sleeps with another woman, a lipstick lesbian, a butch, a dyke, a woman married to a man who sleeps with women, a male in a female body who sleeps with a female, a female in a male body who sleeps with males in female bodies, an asexual biological female, a female who wishes she was sleeping with another female, or maybe even a five- year- old. Maybe all of these people identify as lesbians, and maybe none of them do. Does it matter?
We need another starting point. What happens if everyone keeps his or her pants on, and sex is out of the equation. What if we think in individual terms and then ask: is the lesbian spirit becoming extinct? Another big mess—what is a lesbian spirit? Are some of us born with it? Do some of us evolve into and out of it? In 1948, Kinsey postulated the majority of us are bisexual, and the dominant culture influences life choices. This is precisely why the issue is so sticky. Culture plays a significant role in determining individuals' subconscious decision-making and identity politics, even though for many of us, being a lesbian is not a choice.
The ladies are attending an opening (a photographic collection of drag kings) at Charlotte's art gallery. Samantha comments, "I bet being a drag king would be fun." Miranda quips, "Oh, please, I have enough trouble figuring out how to be a woman in a man's world, without trying to be a woman pretending to be a man in a man's world." Charlotte introduces the artist, Bared. "What inspired you to do this?" Miranda asks. Bared replies, "I feel we have dual powers in each of us. Men can be very female, and women can be very male. Gender is an illusion," turning to Charlotte, "sometimes a very beautiful illusion."
Later, after Carrie discovers her current boyfriend is bisexual, she muses, "If women can transform into men, and men can become women, and we can choose to sleep with everyone, then maybe gender doesn't even exist anymore. If we can take the best of the other sex and make it our own, has the opposite sex become obsolete?"
–from Sex in the City, "boy, girl, boy, girl"
Fiction, of course, is one thing. Bared can benignly assert "gender is an illusion" and all the characters involved struggle to incorporate their masculine and feminine sides, but it's a relatively safe struggle carried out within heterosexual norms, without serious consequences. In real life, gender fluidity can be a much more dangerous proposition.
The panic brought on by realizing I was a lesbian was many years preceded by the panic of feeling I was a different species. What could have been a normal six-year-old birthday was instead another personal catastrophe. In less than a year, my brother, a friend, a friend's mother, and my cat died. Mortality and identity had been forced into the spotlight early in life. After my brother's burial, as people scattered, my mother took me aside to explain my brother was now in the ground next to my grandfather. Then she explained that she and my father would be buried to the left of the family stone, and my other brother and his future wife would be buried to the right of the stone. The obvious question was where would I be buried? She responded, "with your future husband of course." I immediately said, "Well what if I do not want a husband? What will happen to me?" I do not remember what she said. Probably somewhere in the textbook on child development, it's written that birthdays are perfect occasions for re-establishing normalcy, and god knows we needed some, so my mother threw a party.
In my mind, there was nothing normal about a home filled with squeaky girls I hardly knew from school. At least my best friends who lived in our circle of Baltimore row houses were there, David and Mathew. We all had dinner and cake, but sometime shortly after, it was announced Mathew and David had to go home. If I had known how to curse then, it would have probably gone something like this: "You make me hang out with all those bitchy girls from school, and thank god Mathew and David are here, and now they have to go home? What is the point of having a goddamn sleep-over birthday party if my best friends are not allowed to stay?" My mother offered some kind of explanation as to why, something about inappropriateness, then went back to the girls who were still squealing about one thing or another. And then it happened.
I crouched in a corner of the kitchen, heard the other girls carrying on in another part of the house, happy as clams, and the thud of the front door closing as David and Mathew went home. I felt like a complete outsider at my own birthday party. The only recourse was to go downstairs and sit in my father's lap. He was watching M.A.S.H in what we would now term the man cave. I don't think he said much, but that was probably the most comforting thing of all. We both could hear the running back and forth above, and escape the craziness. I do remember wanting to ask him, wanting him to explain to me why Mathew and David had to leave, why those crazy girls could stay, and who was I, then? When M.A.S.H was over he said I needed to go back upstairs. Anyway my mother soon came looking for me, and gave a lecture about being a bad hostess.
The next morning, all the girls were doing each other's hair. As soon as they left, I went outside and rode bikes with the boys. In that moment, I felt synoptically that I was not like either tribe: I was not entirely in the world of Mathew, or David, or Ian, my other buddy, and despite my willingness to try hair styling, I was nothing like the other girls. I remember going over and over this in my head, while we went over and over the concrete sidewalk slabs on our bikes, as if I could pedal myself into the answer.
I never liked dresses. My mother was crafty, and on the best of days, could be convinced to go with the flow. She had made me three vests to match with splendid trousers, and when I wore them I felt unstoppable, like my father when he left for work in the morning. I would watch him lather up the horsehair brush in his mug, run the razor across his neck and chin, taking notes in my mind for what I would do when I was his age. I'd get ready for school in my room while his shower water was running, wait for it to stop, wait ten minutes, and knock on the door so I wouldn't miss the tie-tying routine. Even with the mishap birthday party close in mind, I could not comprehend that my body was not a miniature version of his body. I had caught on that my brother and I had slight differences, mainly that he cried a lot, oh, and the penis. But in my mind, our bodies were the same and as we each grew up, we would grow into bodies that fit us.
I started taking swimming lessons at the Howard Johnson hotel down the road. The first day I packed my gear bag and walked down, got dressed in the locker room, and came out to the edge of the pool with my bottoms on, sans top. I did not understand that girls' nipples had to be covered, and boys' nipples did not, and I swear on anyone's grave, I honest to goodness did not know which I had to do—to cover or not to cover—for swimming lessons. I was sitting at the edge of the pool like the other participants, and realized in the eyes of the instructor I had made a major mistake. I was called out. I will never forget that day either. The instructor went on with the lesson—getting our heads underwater and counting to five—but I couldn't get over the fact that I had chosen wrong, that what it came down to is that I was a partially nude female, not a perfectly fine male. That particular day that I realized my body belonged in one category, even as the rest of me did not.
We moved south. After school, I'd ride bikes with the Murtha brothers and Jeff. My father bought me a small hammer and together we built a tree-house. He also bought me my first mitt. By third grade I had found a new posse, Stacey, who was like me, and our gorgeous counter-part Kenyatta. In hindsight I can understand the magic of this triumvirate: we were outsiders, the two tomboys (whatever that means) and the one African-American in the racist south. I was separated from them in middle school. Neighborhoods determined what school you were funneled to, and I was stuck with the waspy weirdoes.
By sixth grade, my whole sense of self unraveled. I couldn't conceal my breasts anymore, then there was the issue of bleeding and all the equipment and planning that went along with it. Not to mention, cramps were tough from day one. In physical education class, girls and boys were separated. Gone were the days of playing with the boys. On top of all that, we were now expected to shower after class. Some lesbians reflect back on this period with wild stories of watching the other girls get naked. I felt like an imposter. Most girls felt perfectly fine being naked around each other, I even saw two girls kissing, and when another girl wanted to try because she wanted a boyfriend, it all made sense. This is what girls do: they practice kissing each other before they have boyfriends in just the same way I practiced along with the boys because I would have a girlfriend. I kept these thoughts—confusing, terrifying, hopeful—to myself.
I made some sort of peace with my identity, my body, my spirit. Instead of perceiving myself as not female and not male, I saw myself as both. It seems like a subtle difference, but it wasn't inside my eleven-year-old head. It was a private, profound realization that I no longer had to feel split; even while the world was dividing us up into two groups, and to some extent I had to go along with that, I didn't have to choose inside. Of course I had no vocabulary or any real sense of what all this meant. It wasn't necessary, I could just be. Two-spirited in one body.
I met Jennifer who had recently moved to the neighborhood. We instantly became best buddies, and she was my first crush. We tried out for a game show together in Richmond, and later that evening, after her mother drove us back to their place, we got ready for bed. I had brought along my sleeping bag, yet Jennifer imperatively announced "you will sleep with me." I was dumbfounded. I liked her, a lot. For the first time I understood why David and Mathew had to leave…and how, in fact, in reality, I should not be sleeping in a bed with Jennifer! I wasn't completely her opposite, but I knew it felt perfect kissing her. I asked her if she was practicing. "For what?" she asked. "For a boyfriend," I mumbled. She looked at me and said "I'm not practicing for anything. I'm kissing you." That is the moment, right there. I felt completely in love/lust with another person who felt the same way about me, all of me. Soon after, her father was transferred, and she moved away at the end of the school year.
If it could happen once, I assumed it could happen again. However, by that time, the pressures of guilt and shame were coming at me from outside. In addition, girls were getting meaner and stranger. I had two gal pals, Rebecca and Lacy, and that was enough. Boys were becoming more aggressive; it was impossible now to interact with them androgynously. Blame it all on hormones. I needed a new game plan: research. I obsessively read everything I could find to understand what in fact I was, and spent study halls and lunch periods in the library. In a maze of old encyclopedias I looked up sex and followed all the tag lines until I read the word homosexual. Then I read the word "invert." Who knows how old the reference books were, but there was some line in there about whether or not inverts were curable. For the first time, I was scared. Then I discovered an article on Martina Navratilova and Billy Jean King in a current magazine, and somehow decided that it was going to be okay if I was an invert, because it seemed they were, too. I would escape as soon as I could, and go find "my people."
I lived in a very conservative neighborhood outside of Richmond, Virginia with a politically-entangled father and a mother who could swing both ways: she encouraged my independence and autonomy, as long as it didn't threaten the façade of family or tenets of the Southern Baptist church. The small world around me—like a constant drone through a bullhorn—said over and over that homosexuality was wrong. I knew I had to make a hard, strategic decision to disguise who I was in public in order to survive long enough to get out. In hindsight, I know that decision, sometime around Christmas in 1988, was the only viable choice I had, yet I also know it was one of the most painful ones in my life. It's not that I didn't accept my truth; I accepted that I was a two-spirited person in a female body, and that I was attracted to other females, but I had to succumb to the pressure to appear one way on the outside in order to survive.
Once again, just like at my first grade birthday party, I had a sense of hope in a future I did not know, but trusted would come. And then proceeded to date many boys. Strangely enough, it worked out for the next three years. Wrestlers, football players, a cross-country runner, a swimmer. They all were quite similar to each other: very sensitive hearts, body-focused, disciplined, and…as it turned out, some were bisexual. At the time, again, there was no vocabulary running around our part of the southern-conservative woods to explain what we were doing, or why. We just did. In part, the biggest taboo was pregnancy, so it made perfect sense that what we engaged in was more homosexual than heterosexual. We were making do with what we had in a world where at least we looked normal publicly.
At home, I could do anything, stay out until all hours if I was with a boy. If not, the curfews came down. I could not mow the lawn; I was to wash the dishes. Anytime I exerted myself as a young feminist, I felt the air thicken, mostly by my mother, though even my father had changed a lot since my pre-pubescent years. He was under considerable stress with many things, though I will not make excuses for him. We butted heads constantly, and several times I saw the crazy look in his eye and his hand would go up, as if I would get the beating of my life. I never did, but he did lose it once and hit me hard in the jaw. What was really at stake was losing my ally of the moment.
The only time I really felt my mother was pleased with me was the night I announced I would be attending Ricky's junior prom the following week. The dress, the shoes, the French hosiery with the seam stripe up the back, and then the hair, the make-up. I hated the whole thing, but more than that, I didn't know what to make of the fact that my mother was having the time of her life. It crossed my mind, this is that first- grade birthday party all over again! Hells bells! Ricky arrived with the flowers and mom whipped out the camera and then fussed over how I should pin the corsage on his lapel, the camera snapping. He had his arm around me. He knew, in his own 17-year old male way, that I was a wild stallion who now had been officially broken…by her mother. He had never wanted to break my spirit, none of the guys did. We didn't talk about it, as we drove away, or at dinner at the Hotel Jefferson, or when we arrived at the prom, or when we left after fifteen minutes and drove back to his place. His parents were away, and we ate gummy bears in his kitchen, and he gave me some of his clothes to change into.
That night, which started as the worst awakening thus far—the American equivalent of mother-to-daughter foot-binding—ended with an equally profound awakening, thanks to one boy-man's strong intuition. He wanted to show me "The Hunger." It wasn't until many years later that I actually saw how the movie ended, because as my eyes were popping out of my head watching the mesmerizing seduction of Susan Sarandon, Ricky announced that he would be Catherine Deneuve. That moment, that night, is really my big coming out story, and it was with a guy. It was the first time that I really connected to my sense of femaleness in a sexual way through lesbian role-play. I owe a debt of gratitude to all the guys back then, especially to him. I was not as kind as I should have been, not as considerate or as gentle as I should have been with their hearts. I regret that.
Anger came next. Now that I had the all the pieces to my puzzle, there was nowhere to go. I resented the boys I spent time with and they knew it. I did the normal things people do when they are miserable with their life choices and are circumstantially powerless to make necessary changes. I drank, did drugs, buried myself in school and overachieving, got a job to get out of the house, pretty much ran myself ragged trying to avoid having to sit with my own feelings. I couldn't talk to anyone about being gay. I did find the gay bar downtown, Babes, a safe watering hole where it was easy to drink, but the women all seemed weird; I didn't see Catherine Deneuve there, or anyone else who made me look twice. There were bimbo-looking women with big hair, and the meanest toughest bulldykes imaginable. There was one woman who would hang out with me, in a big sister kind of way. She said I should focus on college, that I would meet someone my age and the world would open up.
I was on a mission, and devised a big ruse for the colleges I wanted to visit, all up north. I drove my mother and brother all around New England, but I was only interested in Northampton, home of Lesbianville, USA, and Smith College. My interview went fine, yet the school itself was small, homogenized, and reminded me of my high school. Umass was around the corner in Amherst; it was big, diversified, and they had a small but inspiring gay population with its own dorm. Back in Virginia, senior year, a newfound purpose: get out as soon as possible. My mother was catching on, especially after she read in the university literature about the GLB 2-in-20 dorm floor, and coincidently made it clear that I would go to a school instate. As the acceptance letters rolled in, she upped the ante; if I was going to school out of state, I'd have to pay for it myself.
I took on three jobs. I worked hard, played hard, and picked up a book someone from Babes recommended: How to Come Out to Your Parents. I accepted UMass's offer; my grandmother bought my train ticket for early freshman orientation. I was so close to freedom! One week from when I was to leave for school, my mother went through my drawers and found a copy of the how-to book next to a bottle of whiskey, and within two days, the paddy wagon came and took me away. Lockdown for thirty days in a place called of all things Serenity Lodge. I was told that I was an alcoholic with a gender identity disorder. I was drugged with meloril and had two seizures from it. I paid a very high price for the chance of freedom—the chance to get the hell out of the south. Maybe it was the drugs they had me doped up on, but part of me gave up then. I was losing everything I had worked so hard for. The only thing redeeming about the experience was meeting two wonderful women; we would support each other through it. This is when I learned, at ground zero, what feminism can be; how women support each other like an underground railroad.
After release, my mother reassured me, saying she had taken care of UMass and cancelled my admissions. And by the way, maybe I should live with my aunt and go to school around there. I didn't have the same spirit or determination anymore. We had an argument in December, ending in me saying adamantly I would go to UMass for the January semester and if she tried to stop me, I would simply vanish. I don't know what happened behind the scenes, but my only living grandparent, my maternal grandmother who had purchased the first train ticket, bought another, and this time my mother didn't stop me. I made it to school, finally, and three months later my grandmother died. Two weeks before, she wrote me a note. She knew. It was ok. But I had lost my only familial ally, and now, beyond a doubt, was 100% on my own.
School was ok. I enjoyed most of my classes, and I learned a great deal about lesbians. I had found my people, but something more substantial was missing. I looked everywhere. It all seemed petty and juvenile, the same shallow physicality that I experienced with guys. I wanted to feel connection. I wanted to feel the same thrill as I had with Jennifer in middle school, with an added sexual maturity. Then one day, someone special caught my eye and I caught hers. She introduced me to her nontraditional friends with whom I instantly felt a kinship. Everything was falling into place. I really didn't have time to be a footloose 18-22-year-old; I was working full time, and also, in a sense, if you have fought so hard to get somewhere, it's rather impossible to fall in with collegiate anything-goes-party-hard-and-get laid.
Part of the terms of my release from Serenity Lodge, and what I think was a deal my grandmother made with my mother, is that I would go to therapy. I didn't mind, it was the only thing my mother would pay for, and somehow that made me feel like she cared, or maybe even that she was sorry. I learned a great deal, and for the most part it felt non-confrontational. I made a series of mistakes though, by letting down my guard and spilling the beans about dating a special woman, and how I really didn't think I was a drug addict or gender- confused, and that maybe we should stop these weekly sessions. Jesus god, within minutes the world was spinning again, she had my mother on the phone and I was like a doe in the headlights. I remember calling Anna and telling her they were trying to lock me up again. She said they can't do that now, you are not a minor, and proceeded to list my legal rights. I don't know why I didn't fight. Oh I wish I had. It was like the third alternative to fight or flight when you become motionless, frozen, a kind of misdirected neurological response to overwhelming stress.
The next day I was locked up again. And drugged again. This time with certifiably scary crazy people. There are many uncomfortable things I learned there that I wish I didn't know. Again, it was hard to put the pieces together in that haze, and still hard to put them together now. What I can say is that even in 1993, professionals, when co-coerced by family members, did what they could to break the spirit of strong women and re-route them to heterosexuality. There were times when I thought perhaps the straight women are the lucky ones, to have escaped this life. It was like a prison, really. Bars on the windows, metal lockdown sliding doors, tunnels underground. They drug you so it's hard to get your bearings.
The plight to stay alive, to hold on to your sense of self under immense pressures for such a long time, for what seemed like a lifetime, takes its toll. I got out of there one day before the fall semester was starting, and hadn't even enrolled in my courses. I raced around and caught myself up. That last experience made me so sad, it took awhile to find my footing again. I knew deep down I was having to make a choice, that accepting myself would mean that my family did not accept me at all. Moreover, they could never be trusted, even from 600 miles away. This was the mad irony. I accepted myself, loved myself for who I was, a two-spirited person in a female body, and this was wrong. An illness. A disorder.
There was something communal, magical, light about those years, autumn of 1993-1997 in the Pioneer Valley. I was surrounded by amazing women in their 30s—like having a dozen big sisters. I was studying biology and philosophy in school, but learned from them about the women's movement, gay and lesbian history, women's rights, politics. They called me a "baby butch," and I really did not know what that meant, but it felt okay. I knew I was a feminist, a lesbian, and I felt at home inside and in the world.
I was together with Anna during that time. What began as a passionate affair quickly turned to another sort of co-existence. We were the best of friends who happened to have sex sometimes. I maintained a separate apartment, even though we spent nights together. It's what I needed. She needed me to return to the same bed every night, and I did. We separated when it was clear at one point that we each needed different things. It wasn't easy, letting go of the best relationship I had known, letting go of the familiarity, the rituals of our lives. But it was peaceful. I was happy to see her happy when she found someone who could love her the way she wanted to be loved. Most of the women in that core group had moved out west, or were moving away. I moved further north.
By 1999, the landscape of gay rights and politics was changing. From what I could see, segregated gender roles were making a comeback and at the same time, the tranny movement was gaining momentum; conservatism was creeping in. At first I didn't notice. In the community, people seemed to be buckling down into the butch-fem model again in ways I found limiting. In Vermont, where I had been living for the past two years, the fight for civil unions was underway and it was a vicious, hateful time. There was a push within the community to shape up, mirror the heterosexuals so we can get the rights we deserve. Everybody couple up; have a kid, rent a kid, whatever; look upstanding. On the other side, the social conservatives were plastering their bumpers with stickers that read: Kill a Queer, not a Deer and Mom and Dad, not Steve and Brad. I was working in the commercial and industrial construction field; it was a hateful environment for a woman who would not allow others to sexualize her, and would not participate in degrading other women, either. I developed a clan-group of sorts with a handful of guys who were necessary protectors. Still, the only way to earn the respect of 250 pound men is to do what they do, only faster and better. When you weigh 115 pounds, it's quite a feat to haul 105 pounds up three flights of stairs, day in and day out. But these are things you have to do in order to gain their respect as a person, a co-worker, and not as a woman who must have had to do sexual favors for the boss in order to get the job. Thank god at some point brains were allowed to trump brawn, and I did the punch list, went in after the job was finished and communicated with the GC, architects, other foremen, to correct mistakes.
At some point, I believe it was 2001, we had to sign an agreement stating we would not discuss our salaries. Howard Dean had lost the governor's race because of his support for civil unions, and there was a backlash from the new Douglas Administration. They were trying to dissolve the Governor's Commission on Women which had been pushing an "equal pay for equal work" bill, and here, right in the thick of it, we had to sign a gag order at work saying we would not discuss our pay. I broke it one day when some new kid was put on my site, some cokehead fresh out of prison. He was making more than me, and I had years with the company and foreman experience. I was aghast. I left soon after and became my own subcontractor. Previously, when we had annual reviews, I earned a 50- cent wage increase. When I found out my peers of equal standing had received $1.50 an hour increase, I asked the owner why I didn't. They have families to support. You understand.
There are a gazillion hidden privileges that come along with identifying as male, regardless of one's vocation or profession. I had met very few women in all the large job sites I had been on, but oddly enough, more than a dozen FtMs. They were much colder to me than the men were, I figure because they thought I might blow their cover. Ironically, they had the more expensive carharts and insulated boots, newer trucks. They were not paid 73 cents on the dollar.
I was 27 in 2001. Bush was in office, 9-11 happened; Howard Dean ousted, Jim Douglas in; lesbians and gay men were assimilating; on the fringes, the transgender movement was further undefining the denotative definition of transgender, "across, beyond, on or to the other side of" gender, into a new body politic which more often than not implied a (certain) divorce from one's corporeal identity. For biological females, the undercurrent of anti-femaleness was hard to ignore. In my own case, it was a pressure from lovers, and peers as well, asserting the same kind of pigeonholing I experienced growing up. I was a lesbian because I was female and slept with other females, but I was not a fem or a butch, which was beginning to disqualify me from the circle. Even if I identified as a two-gendered person, now I had to deny my femaleness in order to "qualify." I have not always understood my body as it looks in the mirror, but I love it for being "me." Nonetheless, by 2001, to identify as transgender meant you bound your chest, packed at home if not also in public, and above all else, didn't feel. Girls have feelings, they process, they hang out together. Lovers expected you would always be strapping it on, and objectifying them the way men do. Drink beer from a bottle. Grow all your hair. We, the truly transgendered, were pushed to be male-identified, instead of holding on to a sense of a gender continuum. It took a bit of time to really put my finger on what was going on.:In print media, columnists were calling feminism "the f word," academics were writing about postfeminism, and the LGBT community separated, in spirit, from the fundamental principle: women are people, too. Beyond a reasonable doubt, third-wavers—gen-x and gen-y—guided the psychic-spiritual shift.
My concept of "my people," my familiars, began to shift to a mixed bag of sexual orientations, ages, and affiliations. The things we had in common were critical thinking, women's rights, free will, an examined life, a sense of democracy, art, creative expression. Sexual orientation and gender became a mute point. A sense of humanity and feminism was forefront. I had little in common with my peer group who all seemed especially caught up in playing house and having babies, or on the other hand, switching personal pronouns and/or taking testosterone. Around this time, I was at a party, bored out of my mind, reading a magazine, when I heard a voice exclaim from across the room, "Oh I loved Antonia's Line!" I looked up at the mention of one of my favorite all-time movies, and there she was. As she has re-told the story many times, she had been watching me, instantly attracted, that wild phenomenon we sum up in one phrase, from across a crowded room.
From that point onward, it is a long, magical, inspiring, and heartbreaking six-year tale which can be summed up as pivoting around one truth: never before had either of us so deeply connected with another. When the friendship moved into physical intimacy, there was a purity to that moment, reminiscent of Jennifer, and Anna, only now deeper, more complex, more beautiful. It was the first time as an adult that I had been filled with all-encompassing, I mean all-encompassing awe towards another. Aside from that, it was also the first time someone saw me for all of me—for every facet of my being, not just what they wanted to see. Ray didn't ask me to be more female. She didn't ask me to be more male. Her running joke was that she wasn't a lesbian, but an Elizabethan. And for some reason this still cracks me up, the most simple and clever way to say, I love all of you for you. She was on the Governor's Commission on Women, and an active member of the local NOW chapter, so there were a lot of functions to attend. The question would come up, how did you two meet? And Ray would say, "at a salon on the west bank of Paris. It was 1921, or 1922, I can't remember exactly. It was quite a long time ago." Then she'd smile at me, and whoever asked the question would be mildly confused. And who knows, maybe she was right all along. We knew each other instantly in ways that supersede logic.
That said, I don't think any two people could have fallen in love under more trying circumstances. Aimée and Jaguar, yes. It was hard, and put us both through the sort of trials no one should have to go through. Ultimately, she couldn't embrace herself. She was being pummeled from all sides, from her eldest daughter, from her friends who, once they found out we were lovers and not platonic friends, chastised her. Her "best friend's" husband, a dark-ages Freudian psychoanalyst, wanted to "un-gay" her, her ex-husband was trying to destroy her, and then, well, there is the issue of small-town gossip. It was horrendous. I did everything I could to protect her and failed. I believe she did everything she possibly could to hold on to herself, but it was too hard. I know in my heart of hearts, had the community we lived in not been so utterly critical, mean-spirited and haplessly blood-thirsty (to destroy someone else's happiness, to destroy love,) our story would have taken another route. I know this because there was never a time, once the doors were closed, we didn't feel passionately, compassionately, in love with each other—until the very end, those last three weeks when it was impossible to close the doors anymore. There was no solace, no shelter. With reservation, I can accept her choices, understanding the duress under which her decisions were made.
I can hear the gavels pounding from my own peanut gallery, the friends who had to witness my side of the pain and didn't understand my choice to stay as long as I did. To them I say, yes, I went down with the ship, but—there are things that only lovers know.
Ray forced me to really learn and understand what it's like to love someone for who they are, not who you want them to be. I have missed her when I am deeply happy. I have missed not sharing with her, Look! See the way the ferns are moving before the storm… I have missed the way she'd curl up around me, and sleep with her head on my chest, the way we were animals—something beyond language, definition, beyond categorical—natural, innocent, and carnal all rolled into one. I am lucky to have experienced it once in a lifetime. Some people never do. The rest is too difficult to understand.
After processing the loss, I threw out all previous notions of sexuality and identity and started over from scratch. I officially lost my virginity at 33, and it was officially boring and incompatible. Then I decided to try the faggot world again, and that was interesting, but not impressionable. Then I spent some time with another butch-fem hybrid who was lacking on all fronts non-sexual. Then another transgender grrl who, oddly enough, was a great match except for the pressure to play house, and hark! yet again, her internalized misogyny, projected on me. Not my cup of tea. Last, a high-femme, and high hopes, but no—instead, more bids for suburban picket fences and kids. I did the rounds, a kind of barometric check-in.
It was everywhere—this bizarre urge in women (and men), straight, bisexual, transgender, lesbian, between the ages of 25 and 40, to couple up and produce offspring. Some were single and already had a child, or children, and others made it loud and clear any venture down the dating path would lead to building and expanding a nest. Was it a response to current socioeconomics? Had we passed over into complete assimilation from fighting for partner benefits and the freedom to marry? Or could it be all of these factors with biology added in? What was driving the mayhem, and why was I becoming the tunnel-visioned target for single women under the age of 40? Has everybody forgotten art? Music? Poetry? Friendship?
"While women are certainly no strangers to faking it—we've faked our hair color, cup size, hell, we've even faked fur—I couldn't help but wonder, has fear of being alone suddenly raised the bar on faking? Are we faking more than orgasms? Are we faking entire relationships? Is it better to fake it than be alone?" Later Carrie wonders if maybe she was faking being happily single. But no, after a large dose of self-inquiry she stands in front of a newsstand while the vendor stares at her, with what, she assumes, is pity. "Pity from the man that sells me my Marlboro lights. It was the final straw. I decided I wouldn't let a magazine, my friends, or the surgeon general stop me from being who I was: single and fabulous! Exclamation point!"
–from Sex in the City, "They shoot single people, don't they?"
In straight America, women experience rising pressure to marry and have children by the time they are 25, though subtle and not-so-subtle conditioning happens long before. Nowadays it seems lesbians and straight women have similar behavior patterns. We are all female after all, right? Are our bodies just as geared to perpetuating the species as our heterosexual sisters? Do all lesbians hear the make-a-baby call? Hell no. In fact, if there was ever a case to be made for the complexity of lesbian spirit, it's right now, right here. In 2010, all things are possible for the breeding public; even FtM's deliver babies. Yet something critical is disappearing from the category of choices. As someone who has been in different relationships involving co-parenting in the past, I wonder why gaining social acceptance, among lesbians in my age bracket, and in the culture at large, now involves family-oriented lesbian relationships at the expense of other alternative choices: the choice to be single, the choice to be polyamorous, the choice to be asexual, the choice to define for ourselves how relationships can look and feel. The lesbian spirit has, at its crux, a fierce need for integrity. We need to be free to define for ourselves our own sexualities and modes of expression, without reference to cultural expectations and corresponding privileges.
"By midnight, Charlotte discovered Manhattan's latest group to flaunt their disposable income—the power lesbian. They seemed to have everything—great shoes, killer eyewear, and the secrets to invisible make-up…Power Lesbians and their shoes are like Wall Street brokers and their cigars." Charlotte is immediately drawn into the power lesbian world, and plans to accompany her new friend, Lydia, on a ski trip. First, though, she must pass muster with the lesbian 'queen bee,' an ex-wife of a Hollywood executive.
Patty Asten confronts Charlotte: "Before we all get on a plane together, there's something everyone wants to know. Are you gay?" Charlotte innocently and enthusiastically explains, "No. No I'm not. But I do so enjoy the company of all these women. Everyone is so smart, and funny. I've been spending way too much time and attention on men. It feels like such a safe and warm environment. And while sexually, I feel that I am straight, there's a very powerful part of me that connects to the female spirit."
Patty retorts, "Sweetheart, that's all very nice, but if you're not going to eat pussy, you're not a dyke." Charlotte is banished.
–from Sex in the City, "The Cheating Curve"
I found myself much in the position of Charlotte last year. I was at a potluck birthday party for a dear friend. She is not a power lesbian and neither is her partner. Neither was another couple I knew as acquaintances, though they might secretly aspire to be. The rest of the guests—all couples—were serious power lesbians, as were the hosts. So there I was, single, childless, and in a not-for-profit not-for-power, social services occupation in the company of attorneys and doctors acting like they were straight out of the aforementioned episode of Sex in the City. They were classist. They treated their nanny like a subservient domestic worker; they treated their kid like a trophy, making play dates with the other trophy kids of other couples. They were coldly materialistic. Someone volunteered I should throw my jacket into the smoldering fire because plastic starts a good flame (hello, the jacket is Brazilian leather, extra shiny, and who burns plastic anyway?) They were heterosexist. I was asked, "Anyone special?" followed by how easy it is to find good sperm donors, and worst-case scenario, adoption has less hurdles for lesbian couples than it once did. Clearly my lesbian membership card had been denied, again, and I had no intention of meeting the latest checklist to obtain one.
Later that evening, I went over to another friend's house down the street from the party. She had not been invited—she is straight. We were sitting outside in wicker chairs, under the stars, and I told her some of the things they had said to me. I wanted to check-in—get feedback from the "other side" about it. Was I over-reacting? Had the Emily Post manual been updated recently? In fact, she was if anything more insulted than I was. Spending time with her was another reminder that I have more friendships with heterosexual women than lesbians, because I feel accepted by them and often judged by the lesbians of my generation. The straights have become the new progressive. The women in Sex in the City have a profound respect for each other's differences, and even when they don't understand each other, their commitment to each other's well being is paramount. Is it easier for them because they are all heterosexual? Because they don't have to deal with the drama of physically intimate relationships with each other? Undoubtedly yes; however, this show has a gazillion things to teach us about the value of mutual respect, tolerance, loyalty, and sisterhood—what some lesbians have forgotten. If we are heading towards extinction, this might be one of the reasons why. We tell people like Charlotte she's not "allowed in our club," but inside the club, we sometimes do not treat each other with the dignity Charlotte, Carrie, Samantha, and Miranda have for each other.
It's gotten so that I could imagine myself tweaking Charlotte's statement to make the point. Let's say I'm at a hetero-only female gathering, someone asks are you straight? I reply: "No. No I'm not. But I do so enjoy the company of all these women. Everyone is so smart, and funny. I've been spending way too much time and attention on [lesbians]. It feels like such a safe and warm environment. And while sexually, I feel that I am [not straight], there's a very powerful part of me that connects to the female spirit." Now admittedly it did happen with Ray's friends; however, at no other time in my adult life has a straight queen bee retorted, "Sweetheart, that's all very nice, but if you're not going to [suck dick], you're not [one of us]." The straight women don't require a membership card!
On the other hand, it's a bit disconcerting to have spent a lifetime, and onwards, trying to find a place where I belong, with people like me, and find it doesn't exist in the way I imagined five, ten, twenty, thirty years ago. Our communities have changed, for better or worse. The second place I was institutionalized now offers--seventeen years later—a special program for LBGT people to accept their sexuality and facilitate healing and understanding between family members. My parents joined a small PFLAG group at their Baptist church, even though the emphasis is on supporting gay and lesbian adult children with Christian values. And luckily, for some homosexual couples who married and later divorced, there is a legal framework in place to guard equality and just proceedings. But these examples of social progress only benefit lesbians who fit within, or aspire to, traditional family frameworks. Judging from the recent surge in bullying, teen suicides and the like, it doesn't seem to have become that much easier for individuals who stand out in U.S. society. (And yet it is those of us on the outskirts who often express what otherwise goes unimagined, unseen, unrealized in the culture.)
Virginia Woolf captured the transgendered lesbian spirit in Orlando, which was written for Vita Sackville-West, her lover at the time, and was called (by Vita's son Nigel Nicolson) "the longest love letter in the English language." It is the hallmark of what any long lesbian love letter might be, full of seriousness and playfulness, inside jokes and musings, affection, lust, awe, and beyond all that it's a subversive vision where Virginia re-wrote the rules for Vita. She changed the laws of government, time, space, and history, so as to express Vita's identity as holistic and free, and give the rest of us the thrilling possibility that women in love with women could revolutionize the world. Precisely because we could be unbound to custom or definition; because we could choose and transform the lives we lived.
The women I hang out with today are lesbian, straight, bisexual, asexual; of different ethnicities; of different ages. They are social workers, nurses, administrators, attorneys, disabled, educators, artists, writers, stay-at-home mothers, graphic designers, urban planners, landscapers, biochemists, caregivers, musicians. All of them have a certain feminist energy; all of them refuse to blindly follow the patriarchal manual.
That said, I know there is still something unique when lesbians share the same space. When we gather for chat, or dinner, or a function, the air is different. Not always, but often enough to remind me that we share certain understandings. And I still want to believe when two lesbians share the crossroads of love and lust, something other-worldly happens. We have an opportunity to embody a wholly lesbian-identified pro-creation.
Are lesbians going extinct? Did we ever decide on what it means to be a lesbian? Virginia Woolf was married to Leonard Woolf. Her associates consisted of as many men as women. Yet, her closest, most intimate, sometimes sexual, relationships were with women. She had no children of her own, but was a critical influence in the rearing of her sister Vanessa's children, and Vita Sackville-West's sons. It seems somewhat inaccurate to call Virginia Woolf a lesbian, even though historically it has been important. What I do know is women alone stirred her imagination. As long as this feeling, this sheer expression of heart and soul exists within and between women, lesbians are in no danger of extinction.
Working Notes
This essay was begun two years ago, and how much has the world changed in those years! I am speechless at the breakneck speed with which all things sacred have slipped into danger of extinction. Especially love. I don't understand the role some women in the public as well as private realm are playing to perpetuate apathy, complacency, and spiritual bankruptcy, which leads me to believe that the possibility of lesbian extinction is in direct proportion to the possibility of feminist extinction. More than anything, as women we can't forget our amazing abilities to create and destroy, and to measure those strengths according to the good of each other, our communities, our planet. We cannot forget to love one another, to love with compassion, with grace (on good days), with passion (on lucky days), and sometimes with forgiveness.
I also see bits of hope when lesbians from all generations go back to our blackboards, trying to find ways towards a meaningful existence for ourselves and our communities. We are trying to leave behind what isn't necessary for the journey. This is precisely what any species does when it is on the verge of burning out. Lesbians have been granted an opportunity to re-evaluate our feminist politics, prepare our mise en place, and apply the vision forward. I see us putting our heads together at random times, brainstorming, sharing "notes from the field," and still, despite the challenges, remembering to play together. Sometimes it all can be very simple; as a Texas, all-lesbian band played to a room full of all lesbians, the host, a 79-year-old seen/done it all, shouted out between sets: Oh I have to say how woooonnnnnderful it is to have all these lesbians here in my living room! Yes, indeed. You go, grrl.
I also see bits of hope when lesbians from all generations go back to our blackboards, trying to find ways towards a meaningful existence for ourselves and our communities. We are trying to leave behind what isn't necessary for the journey. This is precisely what any species does when it is on the verge of burning out. Lesbians have been granted an opportunity to re-evaluate our feminist politics, prepare our mise en place, and apply the vision forward. I see us putting our heads together at random times, brainstorming, sharing "notes from the field," and still, despite the challenges, remembering to play together. Sometimes it all can be very simple; as a Texas, all-lesbian band played to a room full of all lesbians, the host, a 79-year-old seen/done it all, shouted out between sets: Oh I have to say how woooonnnnnderful it is to have all these lesbians here in my living room! Yes, indeed. You go, grrl.
About the author
Elizabeth X retains anonymity for employment purposes, having learned too many lessons the hard way. She works in varying capacities with dementia clients and their families, which inspires much of her poetry, art, and creative thinking. She lives in southern New Hampshire, where women always stir her imagination.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.