The Total Femme

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.