The Total Femme

In Provincetown last week, we took part in the 2017 Women’s Week, and oh, the glory of it all!

In Provincetown last week, the local paper had a story about the hijinks lesbians used to get up to back in the day, including a Halloween prank that involved a blonde called Trashette getting her butt whipped “with a couple of adorable little apartment sized whips” and then being faux branded on her leather-clad ass by a group of randy dykes.

This is not the kind of local news we get here in our Boston suburb.

Today at QSA check in, the kids asked me if I wanted to share, so I told them about how Tex and I were in Provincetown last week for Women’s Week, our yearly delight. I told them about how being in Provincetown always astounds me because I can be fully who I am. They knew exactly what I meant. “You can be yourself without always being the science experiment!” one QSA member said. “You mean straight people can act like themselves all the time?? What??” We talked about how here, you’re “the gay one”, whereas in an all-queer culture, it starts with being queer and just goes deeper. Queer is the foundation but not the entirety.

In Provincetown last week, a butch/femme couple from Indiana came to our butch/femme pop up at the Harbor Lounge, and we had fun horrifying them with the prices of real estate (“$200,000 for a heated 2-car garage!” etc.), which, I think, made them feel pretty good about all the land and real estate they have back home, much less pricey, much more roomy. Not many other queers, though, no real queer community.

We are so lucky to be near enough to Provincetown and financially stable enough to get down there as often as we do. For health, happiness, and spreading the love, we constantly think about how to carry back the comfort and inspiration Provincetown’s queer culture affords us. It isn’t easy to be both generous and self-protective enough that you can gather around you a varied, loving friend and colleague group made up of people who can see you as a whole person, around whom you can let down your guard a bit and bust out.

In Provincetown last week, we bathed in the gorgeous light, took our queerness to new depths, and rededicated ourselves to art and community and open-hearted healing.

In Provincetown last week, I thought of you, femme sisters, wherever you may be, and I wished and still wish for your complex and unique femme selves to blossom and bloom to the oohs and ahs and endless appreciation of all who behold!

Every Monday (or Tuesday), 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.