Our 20-year old niece is visiting us from North Carolina, came over on the ferry while we were down in Provincetown, went to a lesbian wedding with us, got fawned over by our dear queenie neighbors at the campsite where we’re staying (“Yes, I am wearing my pearls with my t-shirt, I mean, it’s after 5pm!”), heard me read at the Feminist Stoop Reading at Womencrafts (one of the last feminist bookstores standing) and just generally had a gay old time.
As her doting lesbian aunties, we filled her ears with stories about our history, talked about the Lesbian Avengers, the queer history of Ptown, Urvashi Vaid, Kate Clinton, on and on. We kept asking her what she’d read, assuming she needs to and should be educated in the lesbian canon that raised us, oh dearest Audre Lourde, Mary Oliver, Pat Parker, Cambahee River Collective, so many, many more. Nope, nary a one. Despite her being at an all-women’s college and despite her identifying as queer and having tons of queer friends.
Ah, times have changed! She is surrounded by queerness in the now and doesn’t have to look for it as hard as we had to. It’s both a beautiful thing and a worrisome thing in that she takes a lot for granted and doesn’t always know the role history played in getting us where we are now. (Wherever that is!!)
At any rate, something about me is that I LOVE finding books for people. It’s just part – a big part – of who I am. Books are so incredibly important to me that I want to share the love. If I gave our niece all the books I think she should read immediately, she wouldn’t be able to move for the piles. And there wouldn’t be room for her to find books, for books to come to her, at just the right time, in just the right way, where they will make the biggest impact, be the most comforting, and continue to build her wisdom in just the way that she needs.
Like the impetus behind this blog, I give books to people because I am desperate for community. I want to know there are others out there pondering and curious about the same things I am, things that make life interesting and full of import – that make life worth living! Up to a certain point, there’s nothing at all wrong with that, but for me, it can tip over into something tinged with desperation, tainted with the extreme isolation of being a queer femme in a brutally heterosexist and misogynistic culture. I want community so fucking badly that I can get way too pushy about it, to where it stops being about me listening to what a person likes to read and seeing if I can make a good match, and starts being just about me listening to my own wounds and sadnesses. Then the connection fizzles and my good will and the person’s willingness to connect can get all twisted. My wisdom gets hidden by my need.
As hard as this lesson is for me, sometimes I have to let people pick their own book.
My goldfish, my honey-roasted pretzels, my potato chip chocolate chip chipping sparrow chips of gold and granite and quartz, does this happen to you sometimes, too? In your eagerness to connect across the generations, across cultures, across class and race and background and across the universe, do you lose your heart and give over unto your desperate loneliness? Ah, well. We all do here and again!
Today, give yourself compassion, give yourself the gift of curiosity and non-judgement and acceptence of your glorious queer femme humanity that sparkles and explodes and sometimes fizzles because did you hear the part about humanity? and just let it flow, let it flow. You are marvelous, you are wise, you are full of everything you’ve lived through and you are walking miracles, darlings, beloveds.
Keep connecting however you are able, keep building community, keep coming back to youth, to neighbors flying Bad Flags, to other queers who think queer femme is a quaint remenant of the checkered past, keep coming back to yourself, you know, I know, you are golden, you are lightning, you are wisewsewise!
Keep going. I need you, we need you.
And…what are you reading??
Every Monday I offer a Meditation for Queer Femmes, in the spirit of my maternal grandmother, Mimi, who was fabulous, and from whom I inherited her Meditations for Women.
At the Total Femme, my intention has been to post three times a week: Meditations for Queer Femmes on Monday, Pingy-Dingy Wednesday on Wednesday, and Femme Friday on Friday. Lately, I’ve just been concentrating on Mondays. And sometimes weeks go by… I’m here, though. I’m here. Do you have a post you’d like to share? That would be fucking awesome! Contact me at thetotalfemme@gmail.com
The Total Femme 