The Total Femme

I suppose most of us are inured to the egregious nature of cell phones. Just the idea of them is offensive, if you ask me, and certainly most of us have been made to listen to intimate and/or abusive and/or mind-numbingly dull conversations at top volume in public places. Here are two cell phone situations I hadn’t yet come across, and I am still a bit stunned. Will the madness never stop??

At the New England Mobile Book Fair, a venerable local institution, I looked forward to a quiet pee after a rather long drive to get there. Not to be. Not only was the bathroom totally stinky, but the person who was sitting on the pot stinking things up was also on a business call: “No, my understanding of this clause (plop) is that to interpret it properly (slight straining noise followed by plop) you have to consult the literature….” Etc.

As I was driving along in a neighboring town, on my way to pick up Owen from his piano lesson, I noticed a father and son pair walking along. I think, but cannot swear to it, that they were holding hands. In his other hand, the son was holding a cell phone, and talking on it seriously. The father was looking straight ahead with that distinctive I-know-I’m-superfluous-and-have-been-shoved-aside-for-something-so-much-more-important-but-I’m-really-ok-with-it embarrassed cell phone look. He was carrying his son’s school back pack. Did I mention the son looked to be about 8?

My poor Beau comes home on a regular basis moaning about living in the city, “But I don’t understand – why does anyone want to live here?” She lived for a long time in Vermont and can’t wait to get back there. She moved here for love of me and most of the time living with me and the boys outweighs her loss of easy access to the great outdoors.

What we have here is the lesser outdoors, although it can still be very exciting. Our across-the-street neighbor’s cat was killed by coyotes, for example. I see foxes, an unidentifiable fearsome creature who menaced me (perhaps a fisher cat), raccoons and skunks on my early morning walks (sadly on hiatus now because my back has gone Out and is taking its own sweet time returning), so there is a lot of nature drama, although not tracking deer through the early dawn forest (once there was a deer in my neighbor’s back yard, though, poor confused and hapless thing).

I don’t have any great love of the city so much. I’ll be glad to move back to Vermont with my Beau when the time comes and the boys have Flown the Nest. By then, cell phone reception will be UNIVERSAL. How joyous.

A Ranty Review of No Girls Allowed

I came upon this graphic collection of stories (as opposed to “graphic novel”) at the library, and quickly checked it out. I was thinking of some of the tomboys I know who could really do with a book like this. One little girl in particular was very interested in going to “Twelfth Night” because she heard the women dressed as men. She was disappointed with the whole thing, I heard; not quite what she’d hoped for, all that tittery het titillation. And No Girls Allowed: Tales of Daring Women Dressed as Men for Love, Freedom and Adventure written by Susan Hughes and illustrated by Willow Dawson, Kids Can Press, 2008, also disappoints.

The subjects of the stories are: Hatshepesut, Mu Lan, Alfhild, Esther Brandeau, James Barry, Ellen Craft, and Sarah Rosetta Wakeman.

Hatshepesut and James Barry are the only ones who don’t have love interest of the male persuasion – they don’t have no love interests at all, despite the fact that James Barry, for one, seems to me to have very probably been queer. The rest of them dress as men for various reasons, including helping to save their husbands (Ellen Craft impersonated a white slave owner to get herself and her husband up to the north and freedom) but end up getting together with men and being happy to don female weeds once more.

Let me ask the question I asked when I reviewed My Dog Tulip by J.A. Ackerley in a previous blog: In this day and age, can’t we expect a little more? Can’t we expect the queers to be seen and recognized? (Speaking of queers and dogs, here is a weird thing: James Barry always had a poodle, apparently, and always called it Psyche.)

For those little tomboys who are yearning to put on boys’ clothes and have adventures that don’t involve marrying men in the end? Maybe just one wee story? In a book about women dressing as men? Hello? I know nothing about James Barry (born Margaret Anne Buckley) other than what I just read in this book, but obviously she felt very comfortable in men’s clothing, was hugely ambitious (she became an incredibly renowned and popular doctor), and – I’m just guessing here – PROBABLY HAD A SEXUALITY!!! Now, there’s a concept. Surely someone knows something about this and just a little of her love life could have been included – the straight women’s love lives were front and center.

Ok, even if little to nothing is known about James other than his passion for poodles called Psyche, couldn’t the writer and illustrator have included just one story about a woman who dressed as a man because she was QUEER and it allowed her to get on with her life and marry the woman she loved? All I’m coming up with here is Patience and Sarah, who aren’t real people (only wonderful butch/femme characters from Isabel Miller’s fabulous novel, Patience and Sarah), but just because I’m blanking out on my queer history doesn’t mean there isn’t anybody.

If you got up the guts to check this book out, you little tomboys out there, you would get something, yes, but maybe not what you were really, subconsciously, looking for, not that potentially life-saving nod to how you imagine yourself as a grownup. And that is a real blow to your love, freedom and adventure; not at all what the book so earnestly set out to do. And BOY is that a shame!

This morning in Sunday school as part of a lesson about Jesus, Owen learned how to write “fuck” in Greek letters. Those wild and wacky UUs, doncha luvem?

Seth’s soccer game was called off due to lack of players due to Yom Kippur, but Owen’s game was on, and off he and my Beau went after church. The boys, may I say, look INCREDIBLY DAPPER in their very professional club soccer uniforms.

Seth and I hung out a little, then went to Whole Wallet to purchase some luxury food items because my Beau has ripped out the kitchen and we’re getting lovely new cabinets and etc., but it’s a few weeks of hell and washing dishes in the bathroom sink (ewww). Two thousand dollars later, we left, reeling, and I started singing “All Lost in the Supermarket” and saying to Seth how it’s the only Clash song I like, and then I brilliantly classified it as an “Eleanor Rigby” song because it’s about being out of step with the modern world (welcome to my life) and we came home and looked at it on youtube and there was a dumb one about a little boy lost in the supermarket and we disparaged it as made by someone without a clue. Then we watched “Apeman” by the Kinks and then I put on Iggy Pop’s “Party” on actual vinyl.

My Beau and Owen came back to report that Owen’s team won, 10 – 1, and that Owen made a beautiful goal. Owen went up and took a bath, the rest of us played with the puppy and put away groceries and fed the cats.

It’s raining.

We’re going to have early dinner in front of the TV and watch “Eerie, Indiana” which I cleverly ordered from the library after blogging about it a while back.

My Beau said the other day, “I feel so much better when the boys are here!” which both breaks my heart and fills my heart with deep peace and joy. I miss them so bad when they’re not here, and it is so amazing that I’ve found someone to be my love and their step-parent who they love and who loves them. It’s not easy being a step-parent, and my Beau is sometimes frustrated, but she is always completely honest and front-and-center and loving  and respectful with them.

Right now I can hear her in the other room talking about drugs and alcohol to the boys – they’ve both been hearing about this stuff at school in health class. She’s not talking down to them and she’s not dumbing it down, either, or sparing too many details. Never try crystal meth or crack. Period. Etc.

That’s it for my homey kinda boring Sunday blog. Cheery bye!

Lately, we’ve had Seth, our 13-year old, trapped in the car for commutes to his club soccer practice. It’s great! We make good use of this time, chatting in depth about the world of work, higher education, moral issues, and just last night, I went on at length about my dealings with AAA around a seriously shredded right rear tire. All very edifying!

The other day, though, Seth actually initiated a conversation thus:

“Mom, my geography teacher is gay – I mean, lesbian.”

Me: Oh, did she come out to you guys?

Seth: Huh?

Me: Did she tell you she’s gay?

Seth: Mom, come on. She wears lesbian clothes. You can tell. Everyone knows.

Me: (laughing and looking down at my jeans): What are lesbian clothes?

Seth: Come on, a pink shirt, you know, with a collar.

Me: How do you know that’s gay? I mean, maybe on a guy it would be.

Seth: No, mom, on a guy it’s cool, not gay. I have a friend who wears that and he looks cool.

Me: Maybe there’s something you don’t know about him.

Seth: MOM!!

Me: Well, honey, it sounds like you’ve developed some gaydar! I’m so proud of you!

(I explain about gaydar, to Seth’s amusement and horror. He denies he has anything gay.)

Seth: Anyway, she talked about her wife.

Me: Oh, well that’s a big clue.

Seth (having a sudden, terrifying thought): MOM!!! DON’T INVITE HER TO YOUR GAY PARTY!

Me (totally cracking up): You mean, go to the parent/teacher conference and say, “Hi! I’m Seth’s mom and I want YOU to come to my gay party!!!”

Seth (laughing but also completely horrified): MOM!!

Me: Don’t worry, baby. I am the soul of discretion.

Seth: Yeah, right. DON’T DO IT, MOM!!!

Me: Ok, ok.

So the gay parties he’s talking about is the potluck for the queer parents of the local elementary school that my Beau and I got going a few years ago. For the kids to get to know each other, and to offer each other support and camaraderie in the sometimes crazy (ok, usually crazy) mommy/daddy land of school.

It’s been great, the kids enjoy it for the most part (although Seth makes grumpy noises – he actually rather likes being hero worshipped by the little boys, who trail after him with their baseball gloves and stickball bats singing out his name in reverent tones), and the grown ups have formed friendships  and alliances, some more friendly than others, in the way of these things.

For the past year or two, a few of us have been trying to disseminate information to the other grade schools in town, reach out to all the queer-parent families here, and generally wanting to have a more solid town-wide connection to each other. It really seems to be going nowhere, though. This year, I wanted to have a booth at Town Day, but there was so little interest that I had to cancel. Another mom in the group says she thinks there’s just no need for this kind of networking/connection and that people are way too busy. I do think that people have their own support groups – families who have kids adopted from China, for example – but I still think there’s a deep need to have a town-wide presence of queer-parent families. I know how important it is for us, and we can’t be the only ones.

I was so sad when I had to cancel the Town Day booth that I had to cry on my Beau’s shoulder for several minutes. She patted me and said such nice things, like how I’ve kept the group going, how little steps are important, how I shouldn’t take it personally, all of which I heard and appreciate, but which didn’t stop me from wailing, “I just want things to be NIIIIIIIICE!!!” And I do. I want the queer-parent families in town to know each other. I want us to have a yearly (or more often) all-town gathering, like at the skating rink or the bowling alley, where we can get face recognition if nothing else and the kids can run around and never have to worry when another kid asks them about their family. And never have to hear “MY mom and dad, blah blah blah.” Because that is really, really important.

I just talked with my darling neighbor who is working as an aide up in the 1st grade at the local elementary school this year, and she said there are 3 lesbian-headed families in her class. One family I already know (the moms of Seth’s greatest little boy admirer), but the other two I don’t, and I’m so excited for our first school-year potluck because I really hope they’ll come. This is my family’s last year at the elementary school (Owen is in 5th grade, and Seth is already at the middle school, in 7th), so whether or not we ever get the town-wide thing going, we’re going to have to make some adjustments as more of our kids move on to other schools. I would love to:

make sure all the staff in all the schools are educated about queer-parent families

have a booth at Town Day next year

sponsor town-wide events such as a picnic, bowling, meeting at free skate, etc.

establish a regular drop-in where kids and parents could meet

investigate COLAGE (Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere) and think about starting a town branch

use the internet via a webpage, Facebook page, or other networking venue where we could communicate effectively and privately (no names of our kids, etc.)

establish a presence on the school committee

contact the local High School Gay Straight Alliance to see if there’s anything we could do for each other

make use of the town cable television

co-sponsor movies or discussions with the town’s Human Rights Commission

use the informational table in the town library

BUT…. probably, most likely, we’ll just go ahead and have a potluck in October, hope the new families will join us, get a good look at the kids who will surely have grown many feet and have interesting haircuts and tooth jewelry, drink a glass of wine with fellow travelers in the world of queer parenting, and laugh a lot.

That will be nice.

washing machine loot

one my son’s, one my husband’s

dear symbols of them

There are signs all down one of the main streets in town right now that say: NO PARKING AT ANYTIME. Driving Seth to his guitar lesson today, I gave him a bit of a lecture about the difference between AT ANYTIME and AT ANY TIME. He was deeply fascinated and asked a lot of really intelligent and pertinent questions. Ha. Ha.

But anyway (not any way), I’ve been riffing (as we used to say in the dark ages) on the whole PARKING AT ANYTIME thing and feel that it should be the name for my next novel (after the two I’m already working on have been duly completed), or at least a short story. I’m fascinated by ANYTIME. Where is it? What is it? I told Seth it could be a house or a park, but I’m wondering if it’s actually a country. Or a state of mind.

Right now I am in ANYTIME. I spent almost two hours on the phone with my ex, trying to convince her of any number of things that we need to do this fall for both boys, including getting both of them into this amazing club soccer deal that my Beau and I recently found (both boys went to camp there and were ecstatic every day – what a change from the farty-aroundy town soccer with stressed-out dads coaching!). I think we might be close to an agreement, but believe you me, that there was a long, long time parked at ANYTIME.

Two years ago I managed to feel the fear and get my hip operated on anyway so I could walk again. A little over two weeks ago, I did something to my back, and am now about as crippled and in pain as I was before the surgery. I have so far dealt with two chiropractors, one of whom had three cats in her waiting room and spent the entire appointment telling me a) how she’s been good about her diet this summer but she did just have some ice cream and b) about her dyslexic daughter and her battle with the public school system. Her treatment did nothing for me. The second chiropractor came highly recommended and is an arrogant, not-very-observant prickish sort of fellow (the kind of guy you have to come out to over and over again because he keeps mentioning your husband, and he doesn’t mean your lesbian husband, either), but I think his treatments might be doing something for me. Slowly. Sigh. Parking at ANYTIME.

I am being audited for the most ridiculously small amount of money you could imagine. The to-and-fro with MA TAX ESTABLISHMENT is entirely too tedious to detail, but I can assure you, I have been parking at ANYTIME for a ages with this little matter.

Heck. When I started this, I was thinking that ANYTIME was a magical place, like where you go when you’re parking in bed at ANYTIME with your sweet love, like how you’re parking at ANYTIME during those first few weeks when you’re both admitting you’re in love and the whole world is blooming and shiny, like those first few weeks after the baby is born and your boobs and your heart are overflowing and you can stare into each other’s eyes forever and the baby falls asleep on you, heavy and precious. Yes, yes, let’s allow ANYTIME to be that place, as well.

But it’s just that right now, ANYTIME is a bit gnarly, and I’m having a hard time, parked here. I want to be doing my morning walks in the dawn, where sometimes I see foxes, even in this suburb so near to Boston; I don’t want to be going through my bank statements and hoping that my deposits add up to what I told the tax people; I don’t want my ex to still be treating me like a psycho bitch who can’t be trusted and certainly shouldn’t be respected (funny ol’ projection at work again), oh, golly, I don’t want to be parked at this ANYTIME.

The thing about ANYTIME, though, is that it’s always both. At the same time that my back hurts like a mother fucker and all these insane perimenopausal symptoms plague me (I didn’t mention them above and really, they are too tedious to detail, but if you have stock in heavy duty maxi pads you can thank me now), at the SAME EXACT ANYTIME, I am more and more in love with my Beau, she is amazing, she is strong and handsome and dear dear dear to me, I am more and more proud of both boys, ohmigod you should have seen Seth this summer, he and I did a whole fucking year of Latin so that he can switch from Spanish (stupid, bad textbook, boring teachers) to Latin (interesting, filled with history which he loves, and an awesome teacher) – the boy worked so hard and was so dedicated, I still can hardly believe it – and Owen, Dr. Love, having his 10th birthday and deciding he wants to play soccer and soccer only and working his skinny little butt off at soccer camp, ohmigod, how proud I am of him, of both of them, and we had such a nice time visiting my parents out West who are old but healthy and happy and loving and working doing what they love, and my dear friend who is really my sister was there from her far-away abode in South America with her two darling boys and she and I would go have pastry and coffee every morning at the most amazing bakery and talk and talk and I’ve known her since 8th grade and I love her so much. I’ve been doing so much interesting reading, and so many things are going well here parked at ANYTIME. Taxes, menopause, exes, back pain, romantic love, mother love, literary love, oh, and we got a puppy! Puppy love! Maternal pride! Job satisfaction! Blogging again! ANYTIME is a complicated place. I guess I love being parked here.

Having just acquired a puppy of our own, I thought it time to read My Dog Tulip by J.R. Ackerley. I have a 1999 reissue with an introduction by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, of The Secret Lives of Dogs fame.

I vaguely knew that J.R. Ackerley was a contemporary of folks like E.M. Forster and Christopher Isherwood (they have blurbs on the back of this edition), gay, upper class, British, literary. There’s a lovely picture of him and Tulip on the cover of my edition: a thin, older man, round glasses, sweater vest with tie and jacket, corduroy trousers. Looks gay, something about the way he’s leaning coquettishly, cocking his head to one side.

His writing is beautiful, slow and deliberate, nice pedantic words I don’t know and have to look up in the dictionary. You can tell he’s a big grump, a misogynist, a classist bigot, a darling romantic, an empathic and sympathetic observer of natural life.

At the same time I was exclaiming over how much dog ownership has changed since Tulip graced Ackerley’s life (he had her for 16 ½ years starting sometime in the 1940s; the book was first published in 1956), it was gradually dawning on me that all the gorgeous observation and loving detail he pours into this description of Tulip is gorgeous observation and loving detail he could not, at the time (at least not publicly) pour into descriptions of his gay life and love.

Everything about Tulip is beautiful to him: the second chapter (they’re really more like essays), “Liquids and Solids” is all about Tulips bodily functions, and makes surprisingly entertaining and interesting reading (this was, of course, long before pooper scoopers), especially the scene where’s he’s trying to get Tulip to go before they get on a train, and says encouragingly, “Come on, Tulip, be a sport. Shitsy-witsy, you know.”

The third chapter, “Trail and Error”, begins, “Soon after Tulip came into my possession, I set about finding a husband for her. She had had a lonely and frustrated life hitherto; now she should have a full one.” Later in the chapter, he goes on to a seriously sensual description of Tulip coming into heat, which he finds completely enchanting: “That small dark bud, her vulva, became gradually swollen and more noticeable amid the light gray fur of her thighs as she walked ahead of me, and sometimes it would set up, I supposed, a tickle or a trickle or some other sensation, for she would suddenly squat down in the road and fall to licking it. At such moments I could see how much larger it had grown and the pretty pink of its lining. Then there were spots of blood on her silvery shins. She did not bleed much, nor did she smell; I should not have minded either. I was very touched by the mysterious process at work within her and felt very sweet towards her.”

How loving and supportive he is of his pet’s sexuality – a sexuality that is, without any doubt, natural and a part of natural life. His own sexuality? The sexualities of his friends and lovers? Near the end of the book, he details how he attempts to get Tulip through her heats as painlessly as possible by letting her run wild after rabbits in a nearby wilderness area, saying several times that he is able to give her everything she wants, but not what she needs (he does not want her mated again, as it was incredibly distressing trying to find good homes for the pups the one time she did mate and get pregnant).

This particular wilderness area was the site of a tragic suicide many years earlier: “And young Holland, where did he die? Where is the swamp into which he drove his face? Lost, lost, the inconsiderable, anguished deed in the blind hurry of time. The perfect boy face downwards in a swamp… The doctor who performed the autopsy remarked that the muscles and limbs were absolutely perfect, he had never seen a better developed boy in his life, nor, when he split open the skull, such deep gray matter. Ah, perfect but imperfect boy, brilliant at work, bored by games, traits of effeminacy were noticed in you, you were vain of your appearance and addicted to the use of scent. Everyone, it seemed, wished you different from what you were, so you came here at last and pushed your face into a swamp, and that was the end of you, perfect but imperfect boy…” (He references The Times, June 30, 1926 in a footnote, perhaps having preserved the clipping for over 20 years).

Ackerley laments the state of dogs’ lives, that they cannot just be dogs and do what dogs naturally do because for untold generations they have been inextricably linked to human beings, and the two species, as much as they can love each other, know very little about each other and have a hard time living peacefully together. Humans are always trying to make dogs be not-dog: not letting them have sexual freedom, not letting them be who they are. Ahem.

Don’t you think that in 1999, when this book was reissued, they could have had someone like, oh, I don’t know, some well-respected literary fag writer like Mark Doty or Michael Cunningham write the introduction? Someone queer, someone who gets what’s going on? Ok, yes, My Dog Tulip is ostensibly a dog book, and a rather wonderful dog book at that, so I can see why they might have thought of Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, and her introduction is ok, but it says nothing about the deeper waters of the book. Nothing of the above incredibly moving passage – gee, why is that in there when this is a dog book? Oh, I dunno, I’ll just skip over it. Just like that part of Ackerley’s life was undoubtedly skipped over his entire literary career.

Ok, I actually know nothing about his life. Maybe he was completely out and had lovers and was deliriously happy. He’s just got one published novel, according to the information from my edition of My Dog Tulip, called We Think the World of You, as well as two other memoirs, one about his father and one called Hindoo Holiday, and I haven’t read any of them. I also know nothing about The Listener, the BBC magazine for which he was literary editor.

And I know I could look all this stuff up in just a few strokes of my keyboard, but I don’t feel like it. I mean, I really don’t feel like it! Today, I just feel like reacting to an actual book I have in my actual hands. I would like to enjoy feeling outraged, sit around and ponder, talk to other people and see what they have to say without mucking things up by flitting about on the stupid internet and finding sound bytes of information on Wikepedia and allowing them to dilute and dissipate my thoughts. Fuck that. And fuck the publisher, New York Review of Books, for falling so disastrously down on the job of reissuing this integral piece of queer history without putting it in context and honoring it like the brave and desperate work that it continues to be.

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.