Life is Full of Bananas

Last night, I picked Owen up at the airport, where he’d flown in after 10 days on a school trip to France. Senior Assassination had already been going since Sunday, so he had a lot of texting and catching up to do. Sure enough, he received recon from colleagues that his assassinator was waiting outside our house, squirt gun loaded. In order to help him stay alive, I let him out one street over, and he snuck into the house via back yards. When I pulled into the driveway, a wholesome young person popped out of the parked car to inquire politely if this was where Owen lived. I gave away nothing.

One of the things Owen brought home with him from France is a t-shirt that reads, “Life is full of bananas”. Now, ain’t that the truth? Owen deftly maneuvered a wonderfully satisfying stay in France, despite the casual homophobia of his host family and his not having packed enough layers for the damp and chilly French spring. Meanwhile, his older brother remains a ball of confusion, stressed to the max and wedded to the negative; wedded also to the coping mechanism of either no communication, or communication consisting of angry blaming of those who love him the most. Still and all, he seems to be making it through the second semester of his sophomore year of college and personally, I am trying to stick with the positive.

Tonight, I am slated to speak at Town Meeting about the proposed Rainbow Commission, which would be in charge of all things queer around town, something that has been a long time in the making, and for which I and many colleagues have worked diligently. I am definitely feeling good about this, but I am also feeling done. I’d much rather spend time on something that feels both selfish, in some ways, but really exciting and deeply necessary: building exactly the kind of femme community that I crave. Using my organizing skills to fulfill my very own needs. It’s not that a Rainbow Commission won’t make my life in town much, much better, it’s just that I am understanding that this is the time and the hour for me to apply my own creativity and energy to projects that directly feed my creativity and energy. I’m thinking exit strategy for my town organizing and I am inviting in new projects that are actually old projects whose time has come. Despite all our responsibilities with elder care and college kids, Tex and I know that this is the time where pulling out all the stops on our art, relationship, spirituality, and joy is indicated, no, required.

As Tex says, “That is what our parents and our children actually want for us, whether or not they can articulate it.”

So, dear readers, I will see you there, dans la vie, la vie plein de bananes.

This banana-filled week, please accept the above post as both Monday Meditation and Femme Friday. Next week we will resume our usual programming!

 And a shout out to Roda over at Growing Self for nominating The Total Femme for a Liebster Award! Thank you, Roda! I don’t have the bandwidth to continue on with the process, but I very much appreciate your support. Check out Roda’s joy-filled, blog, folks!

Published in: on April 26, 2017 at 11:58 AM  Comments (3)  
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Femme Friday: Femme Klatsch! with Liz

Femme Klatsch is a new feature, where queer femmes chat with one another on all themes femme. Sweet femme sisters – chime in!

 What does femme mean to you?

Who are your femme role models?

How did you find your femme?

and today’s question:

Can you talk about how your understanding of “femme” has evolved over the years?

Deep gratitude to Liz for this gorgeous and generous queer femme reflection!

Plenty Queer Enough

“Lez!” It’s 1972 and I’m in junior high. As most of us know from experience, when bullies taunt you, they fuck with your name. With a name like Liz, getting “Lez!” hissed at you in the halls is surely cliché standard. Especially when it’s 1972 and you’re a baby femme who passes. I didn’t know the word; but I could tell it was something really bad.

It’s 1975: I’m in high school and someone snarls “Lez” at me in the halls. I read the thrilling new Ms. Magazine, I know what “feminist” means, I know what “lez” means, and I no longer think it’s something bad. But I wonder, do they know something I don’t? Am I one? I decide to look into it. I have, after all, met one “self-avowed” lesbian. She’s older, out of high school, and we volunteer at a hotline on weekends. I scrutinize her. She’s assertive, androgynous and seems to know a lot. Not like me at all, offbeat girly girl that I am. In fact, she’s the total opposite. Guess I’m not one.

Also, if I was a lesbian, wouldn’t I most likely be in love with my best friend? Isn’t that what “women loving women” is all about? It sounds lovely. Sweet. I almost wish I was one. I try to picture falling in love with my best girlfriend and draw a blank. Nothing. I know I’m not a lesbian.

1982: I’ve graduated art school, I’m working, and I’m in an all-girl punk band. By now, I’ve met more lesbians. In fact, nearly all my friends are lesbians. It seems natural. It is natural. I come out! But not as a lesbian after all. I’m a newly-minted bisexual. I quickly seek and find my first girlfriend, and she’s assertive, androgynous, and seems to know a lot. As I model my new vintage black leather jacket for her, she sadly informs me that it’s a “femme” jacket. “Femme”: I don’t know the word, but I can tell it’s something bad. I’m embarrassed. I wear it anyway. I do like it a lot. (After a long night of clubbing with a friend, I lose the femme jacket and replace it the very next day with a standard issue motorcycle jacket, which I own to this day.)

1989: I fall head over combat boots in love with a strikingly handsome, tall, dark-haired dyke who is assertive, tough, artlessly sincere, and is so far beyond androgynous that “masculine” can’t begin to describe her. When I bravely show up in a modest black vintage dress for our formal date, she gasps in awe. I’m speechless, gazing at her in her crisp black tux, the first time I’ve ever seen such a bold statement of serious female masculinity. She nearly trips over herself to open the door of her freshly-washed, robin’s egg blue truck for me. I’m over the moon, discombobulated, and on entirely unfamiliar terrain.

Neither of us knows much about the terms “butch” and “femme”, but we dance the steps as if we are born to it. Which, of course, we are. I never look at a man again. (A cis-guy, that is.)

1993: This butch and I have broken up. I’m wrecked. I’m thoroughly devastated. I drag myself through life for a year. I remind myself we had so little in common; we communicated so differently; we wanted completely different things. So why was I so crazy in love with her? Why did I want her so much? Was there anything for me to learn from all this misery? Stunningly, mercifully, Joan Nestle explains me to myself in The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, published that year. Still grieving my lost love, I begin to understand.

Joan Nestle shows me who I am: a femme. A queer femme, plenty queer enough, descended from a long line of proud strong femmes. I discover I have fore-queers! And I learn that my lost love was a big ol’ Butch with a capital B. I discover I’m a femme who needs, requires, must have a butch. A femme with a voracious appetite for butch. Reading Joan Nestle, I feel the awe I had experienced when I put on my first pair of eyeglasses: the world became jarringly clear in a way I could never have imagined.

(Later, I learn that not all femmes want butches. That’s fine too, though I admit it surprises me, and to this day I don’t understand how any femme can resist a hot butch.)

It’s 1995. 1999. 2008. The years go by, and though I can appreciate being femme, I often wish I could de-program the part of me that lights up for butches only. If there were only a potion, a program, a partial lobotomy! Everything is so much easier with my feminine friends. As a femme, it seems I find little in common with most of the butches I’ve met, besides being queer. I try dating a wonderful femme, and I’m ashamed of myself for not responding one iota to her beauty. I feel like a bad queer. I tone down my femme. I lower my expectations. But I need butches.

And frankly, if you’re single, it really sucks if you’re only attracted to about 1/10 of 1% of the population. So I specialize in settling for the Fine For Now girlfriend, because a good butch, or any butch, is hard to find. I have lots of fun, and lots of heartache. When I fall off the horse, I get right back on again. It’s ok, I tell myself; I never wanted to get married anyway. But breaking up is hard to do. Miserable, actually! And I seem to do it every 2 or 3 years. For 20 years. Until……

2012: It’s a summer evening, and I’m wearing a pretty dress and shiny red shoes. I’ve grown out my curly hair. I’m no longer playing neutral. I look up to see the most dashingly handsome butch; or guy? No, she’s butch. She stands before me, sharply trimmed salt and pepper-hair, sporting an orange plaid shirt, and she breaks into the shiniest grin I’ve ever seen. I will soon discover she’s brilliant and funny, and she’s so masculine that she will soon go by “transbutch”. She will adore my femmeness and require it like I’ll need her butchness. But more that that, we will fit together in all the other ways I had only recently dared hope for. This lifelong semi-single femme meets her butch match at last! I can’t make her my husbutch fast enough.

My femme identity blossoms wildly. I revel in it, no longer seeing my butch-loving orientation as a curse, and I rarely try to fit in with the gender neutral queer majority. Being femme is way more fun than ever.

How did this happen? If I had read this when I was younger and single, I’d probably be thinking sourly, “Well, aren’t you just the lucky one! What a cliché ending!” But sister femmes, I’m living proof that it can happen, not “when you least expect it” as I’ve been smugly told: but when you most expect it. I made a decision to expect the best; the best one for me. I found great power in discovering, then embracing, and finally expressing my full femme identity, and all of my Liz-ness, and then I expected someone else to “get” me, too. I felt relief in quitting the well-worn path of dumbing down my particular brand of femmeness in exchange for maximum social approval. Suddenly, luck happens! Dearest femme sisters, the femme journey is never dull, is it?

Liz Bailey

PS: I love the auto-correct for “femmeness”: famines; fameless; feminisms; feminists; filminess! It’s a found poem!

Every Friday, The Total Femme showcases a queer femme goddess. Suggestions welcome!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Published in: on April 21, 2017 at 9:00 AM  Comments (4)  
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Monday Meditation for Queer Femmes — Femme Backup

for Jill

Our queer stories are filled with isolation. So many of us grow up knowing nothing about our culture, our ancestors, our power. So many of us need years to find ourselves, first as queer and then as our own particular marvelous queer manifestation.

As femme goddess Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha says in her poem “femmes are film stars”,

…Maybe we’ve never seen the one that could be us yet

but we make her up

we make her up outta thin air

outta brilliance and ass

Some of us never even get there at all, and for these we grieve and flame all the brighter in their memory.

My butch husband and I recently had dinner out with our femme friend, Jill. It was a sweet dinner, where we caught up, laughed, listened to each other’s stories, the ridiculous, the uplifting, the incredibly difficult, the mundane. Midway through the meal, my husband got up to use the restroom. She had previously questioned me, as per usual, about the layout of the facilities. Gendered, not single stall.

“I’ll go, too,” Jill said and I relaxed. I trusted her on butch bathroom duty, I realized. I could sit back and keep enjoying my food.

Back home, I heard how smoothly it all went down. “I asked her if she minded me going first,” my butch reported, “and she said, ‘Of course not! I know how to do this!’”

Just a small moment in the course of the evening, but one that had meaning for me almost beyond words, and one that situated us all in our most intimate and nuanced queer selves.

Every Monday (or Tuesday, Wednesday, even), I offer a Meditation for Queer Femmes, in the spirit of my maternal grandmother, Mimi, who was a fabulous straight femme, and from whom I inherited her Meditations for Women.

 

Published in: on April 17, 2017 at 5:08 PM  Comments (2)  
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Femme Friday — Kathleen Delaney-Adams

A highlight of my femme writing career was touring with Kathleen and other delicious femme writers as part of Kathleen’s BODY HEAT: Femme Porn Tour. Kathleen was an utter delight to work with and her determined yet calm and respectful energy had us writers giving it up over and over and loving every minute.

Along with being tour mistress supreme, Kathleen also loves cupcakes, writing porn, her butch husband, and helping rescue dogs – in other words, she is the essence of femme fantabulousness!

Deep gratitude to Kathleen Delaney-Adams and the sparkle she adds to our world!

            The rope smelled damp, like earth and dirt, a scent that made her pussy swell. She inhaled deeply, inviting her hunger to enter her holes, to chafe her insides, a burning need that bound her to him. eyes downcast as she had been ordered, she relied on other senses to guide and arouse her. Her nostrils fill of hemp, the thickness of its odor, and the sweaty scent of him, a whiff of his cologne, the musk of her own sex wafting up faintly to tease her. Her ears strained to catch a hint of him, his mood, his movements, his breath. She ached to anticipate what he may desire of her, what may come next, listening intently for a whisper of his own dark longing.

            An hour ago, she had wandered the dank rooms of the basement as if bored, pausing now and again briefly if a scene caught her eye, dismissing most. Hard to impress – she prided herself on it, imagining herself as a femme of vast experience, a heavy player among heavy players, and who the hell could top that? None here tonight, surely.

            It was rare to find herself without a play partner, yet tonight she couldn’t quite bring her interest to a peak, preferring to stay on the sidelines of the Dykes at Play party. Truth be told, and you didn’t hear it from her, the last few months had felt like rather a yawner, and she feared her pussy stank of desperation and loneliness. How damn unattractive. She was shaking her head in self-disgust when she turned and found him watching her.

            He exuded butch confidence, reeked of it, leaning casually against the wall, hands loose at his sides, salt ‘n pepper hair, gray-blue eyes perusing the room, packing bulge beneath his jeans. Yum. Her knees weakened and her pussy juiced up immediately. Damn if she didn’t blush like a schoolgirl. His cool eyes and tight jeans nearly incited her to lie down on her back and spread her legs right there in the main room of the dungeon. Sweet Jesus. Instead, she offered a smile, and held her ground when he pushed himself off the wall and crossed the room to her. Even his strut emanated experience. He took her hand smoothly in greeting, his smile warm, belying his hard swagger and the strong grip of his hand.

            “I’m Von.” Yes, confident. Swoon.

            “Delilah.”

            “A pleasure.”

            She vaguely remembered an hour of small talk, escalating flirtation, negotiation. The feel of her hand in his, however, now that was embedded in her memory, as was the rush of wetness on her thighs as she slowly undressed for him before the scene began. His eyes burned her alive as she reached behind her to unzip her dress, letting it slip to her ankles before she stepped out of it. She wore nothing beneath save silk stockings with a Cuban heel and flawless back-seam, and a pair of classic pumps with a razor sharp heel. She decided to leave stockings and heels on for effect, possible rope burn be damned.

            She was a rope virgin, Delilah admitted laughingly, with a hint of fear and shyness, excited to let him pop that cherry, perhaps the last cherry she could claim. And the thought of being claimed by him left her giddy. His and his alone, even if only for a few hours? Divine.

 –from “Tart Cherry” by Kathleen Delaney-Adams, in Beloved

check out her other chapbook, Yield, and her blogs:

http://belovedwhore.blogspot.com/?zx=f94ef66699db9a2b

http://belovedcupcake.blogspot.com/

Every Friday, I showcase a queer femme goddess. Suggestions welcome!

Published in: on April 14, 2017 at 3:25 PM  Leave a Comment  
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Meditation for Queer Femmes — Do You Have This in Queer?

Over at Mombian, Dana recently wrote about representation of queers in children’s media, where last-minute reveals and extremely subtle hints of queerness are about all you’re going to get. It’s not much better in adult media, either. We all know about how queer characters are extremely likely to get offed at any minute (we’re usually just plot devices anyway), but even if queer characters are allowed to live, they get a seriously puny amount of screen time. In “Humans”, for example, hets get endless slobbery kisses, deep hugs and sexy time, all accompanied by meaningful swelling music, while the lesbos get maybe 2 minutes max to play out their romance, ‘cause who wants to get up close and personal with that shit?

Way back in the day, on butch-femme.com, there were threads where boy/girl jokes were translated to butch/femme, sometimes to comic effect, but mostly it just felt sad. Butches aren’t men and femmes aren’t straight women, after all, but we know why this happens: there just isn’t enough visibility and queer culture for us to find ourselves in, especially for those of us who don’t live where things queer are readily available. And especially for femmes, who tend to be even less represented than other flavors of queers.

We can just lose our queer femme selves as we labor so hard to get along in the straight world at work, in our families of origin, even with our oldest and dearest straight friends. It’s incredibly wearing to keep pretending that we’re fully included, when actually, we’re usually just invited in and are allowed to stay as long as we conform to straight norms. We femmes appear to look the part, after all, and sometimes it’s easier to just play along rather than explain, once more, that yes, we are queer even if you don’t think we look like we are. We get worn down. We reach a saturation point, and find ourselves depleted, with nothing left over to feed our queer selves and hearts and souls. We even forget these need feeding.

“We want to be somewhere where every other waiter, store clerk or passerby is queer,” a femme says of she and her husband’s retirement plans. They are tired of the relentless straight, cis culture in the suburbs. They are tired of unrepentant, compulsive straight people.

Are you tired, too?

This week, reach out to your queer friends. Say no to a straight event in favor of a queer one, even if it means inviting the one other queer in town over for tea.

Feed your fabulous queer femme selves and store up the love. Don’t let your queer tank run dry.

The world needs your queer femme love!

Every Monday (or Tuesday, Wednesday, even), I offer a Meditation for Queer Femmes, in the spirit of my maternal grandmother, Mimi, who was a fabulous straight femme, and from whom I inherited her Meditations for Women.

Published in: on April 10, 2017 at 5:01 PM  Leave a Comment  
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Femme Friday — Queer Femme Rising! An Interview with Sable Twilight

Sable and I met in the Radical Faerie Heart Circle at Creating Change, where we shared such lovely moments together. I am so thrilled to welcome her to Femme Friday, and am moved and inspired by her responses sparked by the following interview questions:

 “When first I found femme, I…” (thank you, Radical Faerie Heart Circle, where we were asked to complete the sentence, “When first I found a faerie…)

 Can you talk about how your understanding of “femme” has evolved over the years?

 Do you see femmes as being able to contribute something unique in this time of upheaval, danger and protest?

 Who are your femme role models?

Deep gratitude to Sable Twilight for these illuminating words!

 I am Sable. Sometimes Sable Twilight. A queer, femme, trans woman in Denver, Colorado. I currently work as a program manager for the transgender programmers a local LGBTQIA+ community center in fair sized Midwestern city Some of the additional identities I hold are white, middle class, temporarily able-bodied, born in the United States, college educated, mid-forties, and with English as my first language. And these are the lenses of understanding and relationship from which I approach my understanding of femme.

When asked to write about myself for Femme Friday, I was not sure how to approach it. While I had thought and read a bit about femme in terms of activism, visibility, and political, social, and spiritual dynamics, I had never really given voice or word for to how having a femme identity relates directly to me. I think, in a lot of ways, femme invisibility has been so strong, so powerful that it has been invisible even to myself for much of my life.

I think I have actively identifying as femme for about six years now, though reflecting back, I can see signs where I have always been femme. I consider myself more of a business femme, casual femme, witchy femme, and occasional pajama femme than high femme. I think one of the most empowering things I have done for myself, in relation to my femme identity, was to recognize how femme can manifest in many different ways and in many different dynamics. Initially when I started thinking of myself as femme, I would compare myself to other people I identified as femme. And I would often judge myself a bit harshly for not having enough of what I perceived as the femme trappings. Eventually I came to realize that, for me at least, femme was more about a relationship with myself, the world, and the universe. For me, femme about fluidity: in my relationships, in my identity, in just about everything. I think that is what makes femme such a challenging to define, because it can be such a fluid and unique for each person.

For me, my femme identity is as much a spiritual one as expressive one. As part of this acceptance of the diversity and fluidity of femme, I have sought to understand it’s diversity and fluidity in the universe and in the divinities I work with. As well as the above social identities, I do identify as a seidr worker, volva, energy worker and as such I have been feeling for a while there is sort of energetic shift I have been feeling in the world, a sort of rising femme energy. I have at times call it Queer Femme Rising, in recognition of the Queer Masculine or Homme energy which I saw developing from the queer (both literally and figuratively) creative movement of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. In a similar vein, I have seen this slow manifestation and growth of a femme dynamic manifesting in the world in an ever-growing manner.

As I have been working through my own connection of my femme identity and how it relates to my spiritual path, I have been working through some of the ancestral and cultural trauma embedded within the femme experience. I have been examining the intersection of femme oppression, cissexism and transphobia, queerphobia, capitalism, colonialism, racism and white supremacy, and xenophobia as sort of an extension of a core anti-femme need for rigidness and absolutism. I have begun to understand how femme passion and sexuality, youth and aging, the womb and death, nature itself have been perceived as this uncomfortable threat to the dynamics of patriarchy, control, and exploitation.

I think femme and the sacred femme and the queer femme have a lot to offer during this time of turmoil. They empower and inspire an embracing of change and diversity. And I think from that embracing of diversity opens the possibility for understanding the world and finding new path. For me, femme inspires a certain sense of hope and deep down caring, compassion, and love for the world, as well as a recognition for the need for action.

I think one of the biggest challenges femmes face is femme invisibility. We are everywhere but sometimes is it difficult to recognize one another. This is of the reasons I have been looking at the concept of the femme spiral. As told to me by a femme friend, this is the idea of putting some form of spiral based art, such as a tattoo, on the inside right wrist. The idea is it become a means of recognition which honors the diversity of our experiences as well as the often-cyclical nature of our existences.

I think it is important we stop harming each other. Stop committing lateral violence on one another. And to recognize we are all carrying within us generations of collective trauma. I feel the greatest and most damaging harm committed to us through the burning times and colonization was the internalization of the oppressor and then using that internalized force to regulate and oppress one another. It is time we start to heal our wounds and reclaim our internal power.

I have so many femme role models. They range across the femme spectrum – the high femmes, the punk and working class femmes, the corporate femmes, the Goths, the pajama femmes, the hidden femmes and the public femmes, the queer femmes, the femmes who embody their identities as an act of femme resistance. Even those most handsome of dapper gender queer, trans masculine, and non-binary femmes. They all inspire me and empower me when I allow myself to honor and recognize them.

I do find a lot of everyday empowerment from the Goddess Freyja, who, for me, is a representation of fierce femme, empowered sexuality, internalized beauty, and shaper of one’s own world, path, and destiny. And Freyja is just one representation of femme empowerment. The power of the scared femme is transcendent in countless divinities, both cultural and personal, across time and cultures. Ultimate I seek to see each femme I meet one of my femme role models.

In between work and letting myself relax with the occasional video game (yes I am a proud gamer femme as well), I have been throwing myself into the online course “The Burning Times Never Ended: A Story of Disenchantment and Re-membering Resistance” (http://callingourselveshome.weebly.com/the-burning-times-never-ended-re-membering-resistance.html) as a way to reconnect with a queer femme past which forces of patriarch and capitalism tired eradicating. And as part of my own spiritual journey, I have working through the book “Lifting the Veil: A Witches’ Guide to Trance-Prophesy, Drawing Down the Moon, and Ecstatic Ritual” by Janet Farrar and Gavin Bone. I enjoy watching Steven Universe, and I think it holds a lot of value in terms of representation and empowerment. I look forward to the next seasons of Sense8 and HerStory. For femme inspired musicians, I am most definitely a fan of Miranda Sex Garden, Siouxie and the Banshees, Sleater-Kinney, La Roux, Carina Round, Ayria, Sopor Aeternus & the Ensemble of Shadows, Jill Tracy, and so many other wonderful artists.

sable twilight

“Just on the border, Of your waking mind, There lies, Another plain, Where darkness and light are one, And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond, I have a message, From another time…”

-ELO “Prologue” Time

Every Friday, I showcase a queer femme goddess. Suggestions welcome!

Published in: on April 7, 2017 at 11:02 AM  Comments (1)  
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Meditations for Queer Femmes — Dag, Noam!

Yesterday on Democracy Now!, Noam Chomsky was telling it like it is, in that familiar, deeply exhausted monotone. I listened to his devastating illuminations until I just couldn’t anymore and I had to turn him off. Not because I don’t believe him, not because I’m trying to hide my head in the sand, but because listening was very rapidly having the effect of immobilizing me. And I refuse to be immobilized.

Before I turned on the radio, I had already done some really hard listening. Earlier that morning at the homeschoolers QSA, a new member had begun opening up and sharing a bit about their life and struggles. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I was listening to this young queer with every fiber, every atom of my being.

A millennial friend recently told me that she is turned off by the climate justice movement because the predominant energy is punitive: if you don’t drop everything and fight for the earth in the particular way they demand, all is lost and you’re an asshole. How familiar that is to me, rabid anti-nuke activist that I was in the 80s. I am remembering those times today, and also hearing my mother’s voice. When I demanded she use her prestige and position as a respected archeologist to join me in anti-nuke protests, she said she wouldn’t be good at it. What she was good at was teaching, and she told me that she was going to keep teaching undergraduates, and if just one student in her Intro to Anthro class learned something about the way human beings interact, if just one student then went on to be inspired to do the work that they are good at, then she would have done her job. I hated hearing that at the time, but I am now repeating it here. Doing the connecting, loving work that you are good at cannot help but have a positive effect on the world.

[Trump’s] extremely unpredictable. But this—the relations with China are an extremely serious issue. China is not going to back down on its fundamental demands, concerning Taiwan, for example. And if Trump—a lot of what China is demanding, I think, is—it shouldn’t be—is not acceptable. It shouldn’t—it’s not internationally acceptable. But the reaction through use of force is just extraordinarily dangerous. I mean, you cannot play that game in international affairs. We are too close to destroying ourselves. You take a look at the record of—through the nuclear age, of near—of accidental—sometimes accidental, sometimes kind of irrational actions. It’s almost miraculous that we’ve survived.

Then he started talking about the Doomsday Clock, and I turned off the radio.

Dag, Noam. I love you and I love Amy for your brilliance and your persistence; I deeply appreciate Democracy Now!’s mission to deliver non-corporate news, but I can’t live there, and I can’t pretend my time would be better spent doing something other than what I am called to do.

And you, my femme sisters, my dears. I see you. I know what you’re doing. You’re confiscating your butch’s purple socks, the ones hy’s inexplicably fond of, because you’re not going to let hym go out in public looking that girly. You’re rocking your baby; you’re walking the dog, going down to the Climate March, going to the Black Lives Matter meetings; showing up how and where you can, from cleaning the catbox to doing your duties as an elected official, to smiling at your cantankerous and judgmental neighbor.

I know that it all connects up.

You and I, sisters, are part of something bigger. All the millions of acts of queer femme caring we make contribute to the love the world so desperately needs.

Every Monday (or Tuesday, Wednesday, even), I offer a Meditation for Queer Femmes, in the spirit of my maternal grandmother, Mimi, who was a fabulous straight femme, and from whom I inherited her Meditations for Women.

Published in: on April 5, 2017 at 2:13 PM  Comments (2)  
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