We queer femmes are good at seeing where a little love can be slipped in. We know how to stroke, we know how to comfort, interpret, sweeten, smooth over, slick on the lube, turn the frown upside down. It’s a skill we’re proud of and justly so.
This life-giving and affirming thing that we do is all about caregiving, and as such, is seen as the purview of females. Anything having to do with women is pretty much always overlooked and denigrated by the culture at large, given that our culture’s beating heart is largely fueled by misogyny. And just like that, our precious art of love is twisted and tarnished.
Worst of all, our queer femme magic can start to seem like a burden. The feminine has a history of being spat upon not only by straight society, but by other queers. Ask any sissy. Ask Mattilda Berstein Sycamore, or better yet, read her book Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?. Ask any queer femme.
When you are good at something that doesn’t get recognized, that is actively devalued by all and sundry, you lose track of its importance. You yourself might begin to run it down, drowning as we all are in noxious messages from the odious status quo.
Have you lost track of your own genius? Are you buried in so many “have to’s” “shoulds” and “baby can you’s” that you are bowed down and about to collapse? Until you can’t let anything sweet into your own body and soul because everyone just expects you to do for because that’s what they’re used to? Let’s stop here for a moment and breathe.
Hey! Wouldn’t it be nice if queer femmes had the equivalent of a Mother’s Day, so there would be at least some semblance of the rest of the world taking notice of our brilliance and hard work?
Today is Queer Femme Day. I see how you do for others, queer femme sisters. I see how your art and words and presence and sense of humor and creativity and sense of outrage and keen observational power and bravery and staying put and going the queer femme distance make life better for the whole world. I see how you persist and persevere and I see how you hide your pain, swallow disappointment, and sometimes turn things in on yourselves.
Today is Queer Femme Day. Say it with me, “Today is Queer Femme Day, and I am in the center of love, I am centered in love, I am loving myself and caring for myself and I am speaking up I am showing up here I am here I am here I am!”
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.
The Total Femme 