The Total Femme

A couple of weeks ago, my parents came from across the country to visit. We had a baseball game that night, but we had the cell, and were waiting to hear from them when they got to the T station so we could pick them up (they always take the Silver Line from the airport). Their plane got in at 5, and at around 6:30 or so, we started wondering. Still wondering an hour later. An hour after that, not really worried but really wondering, we were milling around the house doing this or that, when Owen looked out the window and said, “I see them!”

Sure enough, there they were, having hiked uphill the 3 ½ miles from the T station with their backpacks. They came marching in, demanding supper, not even puffing. My dad’s 78 and my mom’s 77, and by gum, don’t I come from hearty stock??

The next day, after the boys’ music lessons, all of us (sans my Beau, who unfortunately had to work) piled in the femmemobile to go down to Connecticut to a hotel near the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, which we were going to visit the next day. It’s a fabulous place and we had visited many years ago before it was completed. (My mom’s an archeologist, and she has it on good authority that there was no budget limit whatsoever on this museum – the Pequot tribe run Foxwoods Casino – so it is the finest interpretive museum of Native Americans anywhere in the country. If you visit, which you should, and set aside at least a day, prepare to be amazed!)

The whole way down, my dad sat in the back and lectured the boys, like he used to do to me on road trips. He’s a philosophy professor, and he was testing their math and logic skills, and finding out what they’re doing in school, talking about history, what he’s been reading, what they’ve been reading. My mom and I sat in front, me driving and smiling to myself, her navigating and smiling to herself.

At the hotel, even though it was late, the pool was still open, so of course, the boys had to go. I didn’t get in myself, but sat on the edge with my feet in the water, and eventually became, through no fault of my own, part of the game of tag the boys were playing. They would rush around the pool laughing and gasping, then one of them would fling himself on my leg, shouting, “Mom’s base! Mom’s base!”

I kept thinking about being base, about mom being base, for days after our hotel stay. In the life-sized model of a Pequot village before the Europeans came, there’s a little boy on the roof of one of the wigwams, playing with his dog, and on the guided tour earphone thing it has the mom scolding gently, “Haven’t I told you not to climb on the roof? Come down from there!” Even if you didn’t have the earphone, you would be able to tell what she’s saying in Pequot – basic momspeak.

I never put it that way, but I’ve always thought of my mom as base, as a vast and varied source of knowledge (I’m always putting aside things I want to ask her), a source of history and gentle direction on how to be a good person. She has the most amazing memory: she can remember things she learned in her zoology class as an undergrad, grammar from high school, the names of kids in her first grade class.

I am a very different kind of person, but it makes me feel proud and humble to think I am base to my own kids, the way my mom is base to me. Part of the great sweep of generations, passing on the knowledge of our family to the own little fruits of my heart (only one of them is technically the fruit of my womb).

No matter how they join our families, we moms love our babies into being, and stay base, rock solid, holding them in our arms until they venture away and back, away and back, and finally, away. But if we’re lucky – as my mom and I are, as I hope my boys and I will be – even if they’re completely away, they always come back.

For mombian/blogging for LGBT Families Day 2009

Still reading The Charioteer by Mary Renault, published 1959. I left you with Laurie, the gay male hero of the novel, attempting to mislead a fellow gay boy into thinking he (Laurie) wasn’t queer, which he is. The other man persists, however, inviting Laurie to a get-together that evening for his (Sandy’s, the other man’s) boyfriend, Alec. Laurie just wants to get away, but then Sandy mentions the name of the head boy from Laurie’s prep school, the one that got expelled, presumably for being queer, the one Laurie has been more or less in love with all these years. So Laurie goes to the party, but as soon as he gets there, he gets creeped out. All these GAY MEN are there, and he’s having a really hard time with it. Renault says,

“The party had warmed up by this time. A momentary detachment came upon Laurie as he looked on. After some years of muddled thinking on the subject, he suddenly saw quite clearly what it was he had been running away from; why he had refused Sandy’s first invitation, and what the trouble had been with Charles. It was also the trouble, he perceived, with nine-tenths of the people here tonight. They were specialists. They had not merely accepted their limitations, as Laurie was ready to accept his, loyal to his humanity if not to his sex, and bringing the extra humility to the hard study of human experience. They had identified themselves with their limitations; they were making a career of them. They had turned from all other reality, and curled up in them snugly, as in a womb.” (p. 132, Pantheon, hard cover)

I read a lot of what I guess you would call historical queer literature, and this position pops up again and again: Yes, all right, I’m defective – a traitor to my sex, actually –  I’m limited, but I’m going to do everything I can to protect others from it, it’s nobody’s business but my own, I’ll go on quietly being abnormal in as normal a way as possible, nobly subsuming my own inclinations and desires to be as much in line with the status quo as possible…. The idea that someone different from the herd doesn’t deserve to share pasture with the rest of the critters is strong, strong, strong. Right alongside “The Noble Cripple”, “The Jolly Fat Man”, “The Saintly Old Person” we have “The Self-Denying Queer”, all working their asses off so “The Normal, Regular Citizen” doesn’t have to trouble his or her pretty little head about anything other than him or herself. How does this help society in any way shape or form? It only does when you deeply and utterly believe that normal equals the majority (and, in the spirit of the bumper sticker “The moral majority is neither” it helps to remember that even members of the so-called majority are very different from one another once you take a closer look).

As we are finally beginning to discover, even if it’s only in fits and starts and one step forward, two steps back, it’s ok to be different from one another – we can actually learn a lot from one another; difference opens wide doors and windows, as long as we can allow the difference without getting into power play and “my way is the only way” bullshit.

Poor Laurie! So young and rigid in his thinking, wounded in body and heart, he’s ready to judge very harshly other queers who are taking solace in their shared sexuality, talking fey with one another, dancing, drinking, and laughing. Not perfect, of course; the weight of societal hatred and having to live so far in the closet takes its toll and probably there are guys at that party that you’d rather not hang out with too much, but better than being completely isolated. And here’s Laurie, 23, watching with scorn, sure he’s figured it all out, feeling both bereft and highly judgmental. Setting such high standards for himself and all other queers that he’s setting everyone up for failure and digging himself deeper into a big, isolated hole. Some of that is his youth, but the rest is his own complicated way of reacting to the poison dumped on the deviant by one and all.

I recognize Laurie in the “we’re just like you” queers, who work harder than anyone to be upstanding citizens and parents; I recognize Laurie in the overachievers, the self-deniers, the “just happen to be gay”-ers, in the ex-gays, who treat their sexuality like an addiction – unfortunate but manageable. We’ve come a long way, but Laurie’s sad, self-hating way of thinking about “abnormal” sexuality is still with us. I’m different from you – I’M SO SORRY! Here, I’ll take your attention away from it by being the best cop, the best soldier, the best lawyer. By never showing you who I really am, by pretending I’m not a sexual being just like you. AGGGHHH!!!

I love reading these old books because I’m fascinated with the changing ways people think about their queerness, but really, it’s all still with us. Again and again and again we have to keep picking away at the hatred and the violence it breeds, over lifetimes, decades, centuries. Being specialists in queer. Rejecting limitations imposed by ourselves, by an uncaring populous. Making a career of it.

Clubbable

In the scene I just read from Mary Renault’s 1959 novel, The Charioteer, the young gay man, Laurie, is having a pint with a medical student (Laurie has been wounded in WW II, which is still going on, and is recovering in hospital). Laurie suspects the medical student is also gay and realizes that the man is probably giving him signs.

“This was not the first time he (Laurie) had touched the fringe he was touching now. He knew the techniques of mild evasion and casual escape. Though the Charles episode had been disillusioning, he hadn’t given up hope of finding himself clubbable after all. This time, he had briefly thought the right moment had come. But, after all, no: and after all, it was no one’s business but his own.” (p. 112, Pantheon hard cover)

The scene continues with Laurie not divulging anything to the medical student; in fact, he deliberately misleads him by speaking about an acquaintance who recently married a woman.

I’m not exactly sure why Laurie doesn’t confide in this man, but I understand his reluctance to join. It’s predicated on such a deep need for companionship that it’s almost not worth the risk to come out and then be disappointed. Over and over again, I have faced this same situation – not that I’m not out constantly and all the time, because I am, but each version of club I seek out usually ends up being unsatisfying for various reasons. It is a fallacy that people will find each other interesting just because they’re all lesbian moms, or femmes who love butches, or whatever it is, and I have proved this to myself quite thoroughly. Still, I need those lesbian moms, even if some of them are golf lesbians* and I need those femmes who love butches even if some of them are teenage boys. Straight people know perfectly well they’re not going to like every single other straight person; when the pool of potential friends who really “get” you is way, way smaller, the potential for deep hurt is all the greater,  since there just aren’t that many of you to chose from to begin with and the aforementioned straight people usually just make things worse, even when they don’t mean to.

I need to be around other queers. I need to know what other queers are doing and I need to be in regular contact with them. It is an immutable fact of who I am that there are certain key needs that I can only meet by rubbing up against a bunch of queers. Sometimes, especially here in the burbs, I get the feeling that other suburban queers find my insistence on these matters to be just a bit shrill, just a bit juvenile. After all, we’re all adults here, we can certainly be friends with straight people – we are, after all, exactly like straight people, especially straight parents, except we happen to be queer – and we can arrange for our various needs to be met by the community in which we have placed or found ourselves. I think some of these feelings may be genuine on the part of my fellow suburban queers, some may be denial and internalized homophobia, but personally, I don’t find that I can go for long without a serious dose of queerness. I love talking with my straight friends about parenting and lots of other things that are relevant to my life, but there is always going to be a point where I begin to censor myself, either because I – rightly or wrongly – feel the other person won’t understand (and it’s too tedious or painful to explain), or because I don’t want to give away any queer national secrets to someone who doesn’t deserve them and won’t treat them respectfully.

My ex used to accuse me of only wanting to be around people exactly like me – an accusation I’ve examined over time, probably a little too thoroughly (we were breaking up, after all). It’s actually somewhat true, in that I don’t particularly enjoy the situation I outlined above, where I’m always explaining or pleading with or trying to understand the other person without any return whatsoever (a good description of why I’m not with my ex anymore). I am now extremely happy with my Beau, and we are definitely not exactly alike, because I will let you know right now that I do not wear camo, I don’t know how to use a chop saw, and I don’t begin to pine and sigh at the beginning of deer season. How we are similar, however, is the important part, and that has to do with the way we see the world, the things we observe around us, our senses of humor, and the things we agree on that are essential to a life well lived.

Those things are hard to get in a husband, by golly, and, I think, maybe even harder to get in a club.

In my wise oldish age, I guess I’ve more or less come to the conclusion that you can’t always get what you want but if you try sometimes, you get what you need. And by trying, I mean fucking relax and don’t be so darn persnickety about the whole thing. Wonderful things present themselves, and if I am feeling more or less content in my own skin and identity, it won’t feel so painful if members of, say, the group of femmes I have high hopes for, are all in their early 20s and into being vegans and are super crafty and don’t a one of them have kids and I end up feeling like The Crone of the Ages. Ha! Ha! So what! I might get a new recipe, a pretty little dream pillow, and a boost of youthful exuberance that makes me smile. And I’ve been around queers, which is always like a vitamin.

This is not to say I don’t get grumpy a lot. Just so you know.

*Golf lesbians are coming to town.
I contemplate this with a frown.
They drive SUVs
And they show off their knees
The whole god damn thing gets me down.

Around the end of every month, my Beau and I sit down for several hours with our finances. They’re complicated because, for example, I have my own business and work from home, she’s also doing jobs for hire, and then I split certain expenses with my ex for the boys, etc. So we sit there for a long time with different charts and files and just figure that shit out. I do not have a numbers head, and it is a challenge, but I love working with my Beau. It’s like doing a chore for the house you love, over and over again, every month. Our house. Our life. Our love.

Plus, also (as Junie B. Jones says), my parents were here for 10 days, and whenever they’re here, we get boxes out of the attic and go through family pictures and memorabilia (I inherited much of this when my grandparents died and then my parents moved), as well as my pack-rat crazy letters and shit.

I have the kind of fliberty-gibbet brain that doesn’t retain a lot, especially if I’m doing a ton of things at once, which I always am. It’s been really cool to go through boxes of, say, my college junk, or letters I wrote my grandparents or parents, and see how incredibly much I was doing at the time. If you ask me, I’ll say something vague and not remember all that much, but the hard data says I was doing at least 20 things at once, and always, always writing.

Correlation: I am doing at least 20 things now, and most of them are worthwhile and very cool. What a thought!

At 47, I look back and my life in some confusion. I could have been and done so many things that I didn’t do. I often look at life this way. The truth is, I did a ton of stuff, and a lot of it was really worthwhile. If the goal of life is to be happy, then what the heck. I have a friend who’s worked at the Boston Globe for almost 30 years, so she has a major career under her belt, but she’s hated every minute of it, and only did it because she had to. Through the luck of the draw, I haven’t had to stick with a job I hate that much (although if I were still working at Harvard as a secretary, like I did before I had Seth, I would be a lot better off financially than I am now), but the flipside of that is that I don’t have a yardstick to measure my success. At least, not what current society would call a yardstick.

I’ve had a couple of glasses of wine, now that we’ve gotten through the finances. Wine is a late-in-life discovery. Do you know, I lived in France for several years and DIDN’T DRINK WINE! How hilarious. If I ever go back, am I in for a fucking treat. How do you string together the events in your life to make a wholistic picture. Can you? How do you reckon?

Here’s something: Maybe 9 or 10 years ago, I was at least 30 pounds heavier than I am now. I was desperately unhappy, stuck in a loveless marriage (as they say), the stay-at-home mom for these two beautiful little boys. Anyway, I was singing in a chorale at the time, and took part in a roast when the (straight) director and a member of the chorale got married. Me and 3 friends sang “It Ain’t the Meat It’s the Motion” in skimpy outfits. I was BY FAR the fattest of the 4, but you know what? I was movin’ and groovin’ and I was sexy as hell. It was quite a revelation for me to see my old fatty-ass self and feel not disgust (as I have most of my life) but love and admiration for how good I looked and how funky I was dancing. How brave and rockin’ I was. That was a tape I hadn’t been able to look at ever – I’d never seen how beautiful and full of love for my friends I looked up on that stage.

I hope you can all be proud of yourself, in all your incarnations. I hope my boys can. I hope I can of them. We change and grow and do all kinds of wonderful things. So what if there’s no “product”. Product is overrated. Enjoy. Love. Eat a lot. Or not. Fuck your sweetheart. Support your community. Be a good mama. Drink wine!!!

Tonight, my Beau and I decided to try a new pho place in a neighboring town, and when we were driving along, we saw the butch I used to date before I met my Beau. She was walking along holding hands with a femme, and I felt very glad to see that she was doing ok. And then, not four blocks later, we saw another butch, hollering across the street to someone. She was so cute! AND THEN, we got to the restaurant, and a two-mom family came in with their little boy, who spent the whole time with his nose in a book, and when we left the restaurant, two humongeous fags went in right after us and the butchier one held the door for the femmier one, who was wearing such a fabulous, very pressed and starched stripe-y pastel pink and green and yellow shirt. So adorable!

It was a two-butch night! Three, if you count my beau. It was SO GAY! And boy did it cheer us up no end. It wasn’t even Pride or anything! It’s so great when you go out and the whole world is gay with you.

My last post prompted me to look up “DJ” by David Bowie from the excellent album “Lodger” (that and I’m writing a novel set in the 1980s so I’ve been doing mood music), and, hello, what a HUGE FAG!!! How did he turn into a desiccated straight man? I guess he’s just a morphing kinda guy. Anyway, check it out!

I was thinking that blogging, way more than doing a zine, is like being a late night DJ. Probably not many people are listening, but the ones who are have their many and various reasons for being up that late and might need you more than you know. But maybe no one’s out there at all. So you have to be ok with just putting out the good vibes and if someone catches them, so much the better. I am actually pretty ok with that. But I have been absent from the studio for a while. For those of you who’d been counting on a little easy listening from me in the wee hours of the night, I apologize. I think I’m going to be spinning disks a little more frequently now; hope to, anyway.

When I went to the bank this morning, I realized that all the tellers were women and that they all had really fixed bosoms. I mean, the bras were just a hair away from the ol’ bullet bras of yore. I know there’s this thing now of nipple-hiding, but I didn’t realize breasts are also not supposed to move an iota, but it appears to be true. I could notice all of this because everybody’s shirts were really tight. This was not all I noticed. I would also like to let you know that the tellers (all women, all bullet-bra’d, all wearing tight shirts) all had a badge with a little paper flap hanging from it, perched precariously on or above one breast. The flap was an advertisement and said something like, “Ask me about how to get more bang for your buck!” or some other lie. I thought, how humiliating that they have to wear that thing on their titties. On the other hand, given how prominent and unmoving and proud their “girls” were, perhaps the tellers enjoyed the eye-catching advertisement flap directing attention to that area; one more reason for customers to look. The teller helping me was Indian and apart from her unmovable, on-display chest, she also sported very endearing, crooked teeth. I love seeing people who don’t look like they’ve come from the American Stepford dentist.

After going to the bank, I stopped in at the post office to take care of some tax mailings. Bosoms in the post office were much more subdued, and, in fact, barely noticeable below the blue-gray postal uniforms.

That’s all for now as I must sign off to go pick up Owen from school.

I remain, your Total Femme, reporting on boobies right here in town.

(As promised, here is a column I wrote in the hopes the Boston Globe would publish it in their “Coupling” section; they did not, and that column remains extremely straight.)

I envy married straight women. Not for their so-called normalcy – I am the world’s happiest queer — but for the security, the breezy insouciance, the endearing sense of entitlement with which they are able, at any moment and in any situation, to utter the words “my husband.” A day doesn’t go by where I don’t hear these two simple words, sometimes dozens of times. They crop up online, on the radio, in overheard exchanges at the grocery store, in conversations with other moms as we wait for our kids to get out of school. “My husband” is everywhere! Women go out to the movies with him, they plan vacations together, he tosses a football around with the kids on the weekend, he embarrasses them at parties with his exuberant laugh, he surprises them with flowers just because, he forgets their birthdays. What a cozy concept he is, “my husband!” And what’s more, everybody knows who he is.

I am a femme lesbian, engaged to be married to my butch lesbian Beau. My Beau and I refer to ourselves as an Old School butch/femme couple. She looks like a guy, I look straight; I love her camo and she loves that I throw like a girl. Please don’t think that we are a carbon copy of the married couple on some fifties family TV show, however – we are both female (and feminist), after all, and everything we do automatically queers the status quo – but we’re pretty happy allowing things to fall as they do, with her puttering in the yard and me doing the cooking. She and I go out to the movies, plan vacations together, and she tosses the football around with the kids on the weekend. Once in a while she brings me flowers, just because, and she has never forgotten my birthday.

But when she and I get married, what will I call her in casual conversation? “My wife?” Don’t make me laugh! In my heart, to each other, to our closest friends and other understanding queers, she will never be anything other than my husband.

But alas, “my husband” is so hopelessly gendered that I would just be shooting myself in the foot if I started using it out in public, selling both of us short as we would immediately be read as straight, and confusing even the most well-intentioned listener. (I have, from time to time, considered using “my lesbian husband,” which is the title of a memoir by Barrie Jean Borich, but somehow I don’t think that would go over very well, either.) I am forced to consider other options.

Much has been written about the inadequacy of “my partner.” What I hate, besides its business-like aroma, is that it’s just a catch-all: “my partner” can be the person I’ve been dating for a couple of weeks, or the woman I’ve spent my entire adult life loving. It has no weight. Oh, and now that straight people are referring to each other as “partners,” “my partner” isn’t even a queer marker anymore. “My girlfriend,” well, although I’ve used that one to out myself in situations where I really needed to be seen as queer, it left the taste of ashes in my mouth. As I’ve already mentioned, I’m the girl in this relationship! “My lover” is a bit too 70s for me, not to mention too sexual for casual conversation. “My spouse” is so blah. “My mate?” We aren’t pandas!
The bitter truth that I must swallow is that there are no words – no short hand – to adequately describe who she is to me. No simple phrase to let the world at large know that I am queer, that she and I are in it together, that we share our lives, our home, our hearts. That she is not just my friend, my roommate, my paramour, my children’s beloved step-parent (she is all that and more), but that she is, beyond a doubt, my husband. My husband.

My mother says all dermatologists are weird, and she should know, as she’s probably been through at least 10 of them. I’m only on about my third, but she’s pretty weird. Well, brusque. Very brusque. And yesterday, she referenced her partner. She wears a wedding ring and has previously referenced her children. I soon will wear a wedding ring, I have children, and I reference them often. I am a big fat 3 dollah queer. Is she?

I pondered this as I submitted to her rough handling of my body parts as she checked my skin for moles and other blemishes that need an eye kept on them. She pulled out the cup of my bra and hauled up my hefty bosom to check under there. She hoisted my legs up, one by one, and checked around the elastic of my undies. She was so focused that my attempts at small talk fell on deaf ears. When I realized this, I smiled into the examination table (being currently face down), because I secretly like this feeling of being some version of an inanimate object. It can happen at the dentist, too, when they get so into the crown or whatever it is that they use your chest as a tray to hold their instruments – I like feeling like a table. Ahem. Back to yesterday:

She said “My partner,” and I couldn’t figure out who she meant. She does have a business partner there at the practice who is female and who may or may not be her wife. Maybe she has a wife at home and they have kids together. I actually almost asked, but was too busy getting off on being an inanimate object to formulate the question. But it does bring me to the subject of groovy, supportive straight people. You know, the ones who think they’re with you in solidarity but who really are just being pains in the ass?

There’s a woman up at the elementary school who drives a car with a rainbow sticker on it, but she never comes to the gay-parent potluck. Is she stand-offish, or is she straight? I recently asked someone about her, (I can’t remember who) and this person said that she’s straight but groovy. “Maybe her sister is gay and she’s showing her support!” the person opined. Ok, I do not feel supported by a straight person driving a car with a rainbow sticker on it. I feel tricked, especially because if she were queer, she would probably be a femme.

I don’t think it’s helpful for straight people to say “my partner” when they mean their husband or wife or boyfriend or girlfriend of the opposite sex. It’s just confusing. I know they are trying to get with us queers somehow, but can’t they find their own word if they don’t want to use husband or wife or boyfriend or girlfriend? We worked hard for partner, and it’s hardly perfect. Now it doesn’t even mean what we wanted it to because straight people are using it to be friends with us. Perhaps this ship has sailed and this is the eighty-millionth rant about this particular subject, but it still chaps me and I still have to live with it.

Please, straight people, if you want to support us, drive a car with any number of other lovely bumper stickers on it — “Straight but not narrow” come to mind — but leave the rainbow alone. Please just say husband or wife or boyfriend or girlfriend when you’re talking about your mate. When you say “my partner” I get this false sense of hope that maybe I’ve run into another queer and that is not nice when it’s not true. It makes me grumpy and sad when it turns out you’re just another groovy “supportive” straight type, and I’m really much less inclined to be friends with you than I might have been, so your ploy actually backfired.

In fact, the bait and switch makes me so grumpy, that I’m going to repost one of my very first blog entries that I put somewhere else before I had this blog. Stay tuned and watch your damn p’s and q’s!!!