Gosh, all week I kept meaning to do the Monday Meditation and somehow the days have slipped by. I seem to have missed Femme Friday last week, too! Perhaps I just needed a wee sabbatical, as this is the year anniversary of Meditations and Femme Fridays (Pingy-Dingy Wednesdays came along a bit later).
Let’s meditate together here on Femme Friday. Let’s meditate on showing up. I don’t mean showing up to kick ass and fight injustice, because we do that already, every single minute of our lives. I mean showing up as in, “Oh, there we are!” Because for some reason, femme lives and femme story and femme bodies don’t really show up all that much in queer publications, let alone out in the world.
I just read a wonderful book by Barbara Sjoholm in which she chronicles her quest to find women seafarers. Almost all of them wore men’s clothing, did men’s jobs, and in one wonderful instance, hung a tissenhorn on her belt so she could take a whiz with one hand on the tiller if she needed to. A bunch of those seafarers had to be queer, right? We can recognize them as such. But, not one mention of the women who loved those seafarers, also queer, but, apparently, not showing up in the historical record or even in the imagination of queers who do historical research on queers and women.
This morning, Tex and I dropped the car off for service. Last time I was in, all by myself, the very sweet but very clueless straight man who usually takes care of us must have called me by Tex’s name 50 times. I said to Tex as we walked in today that seeing us together might be too much for this guy, but he took it like a man, called Tex by her name, and kind of skittered his eyes off me, smiling nervously, whenever I spoke. Later, I said to Tex, “If you’re Tex, then who the fuck am I?” I’m just not showing up at the garage.
Nor do any of us femmes show up in Butch, photographer Meg Allen’s gorgeous new collection of photographs and one of the latest iterations of art that lovingly documents a much-maligned segment of the queer population. Allen “has given our community a gift with her new book,” Curve magazine says, “[she] memorializes the butch not only for posterity but also to illustrate that the butch is very much alive and well in the 21st century.” No question or quarrel from me, of course not! Not only is work that contributes to queer visibility and diversity incredibly important, this butch-lovin’ femme enjoys a little tasty eye candy just as much as the next girl, but let me ask you this (and it’s not the first time I’ve made this query): if butches and masculine-presenting female queers are in need of holding up, positive visibility and being artfully and lovingly displayed for the eyes of other queers and indeed the world, what about a) the female queers who identify as femme and who love butches and, b) the female queers who identify as femme and love each other or whoever the fuck they please? In other words, all of us femmes!
Last night, at a fundraiser for one of my most favorite organizations ever, True Colors Theater, I had the pleasure of reconnecting with a femme I had met before and of meeting another femme for the first time. I am so excited to invite them to our next Femme Klatsch, which is getting pretty close to including 25 femmes. All of us with our own styles, our own interpretations of our identities, our own romantic preferences, our own way of being queer, our own hurts and pleasures and brilliance and hopes for ourselves and for the world.
How is that not incredibly compelling? How is that not something other queers might like to see more of? How is that not worthy of a limited edition fancy-queer-pants coffee table book?
Close your eyes and listen to your breath. Let it all go. Rest in the present, allowing any thoughts to touch down but not linger. let go let go let go
And when you open your eyes and look around, refreshed and renewed, reach out to your femme friends and your queer friends who value femme and all that it entails, and let’s make some fucking art!
Every Friday, I showcase a queer femme goddess. I want to feature you! Write to me at thetotalfemme@gmail.com.
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.
The Total Femme 