“Let me tell you a story,” says Dorothy Allison in her book, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure. “If I could convince myself, I can convince you. But you were not there when I began. You were not the one I was convincing. When I began there were just nightmares and need and stubborn determination.”
Where are the loved versions of our femme stories? They begin with our femme yearnings and move into the world through our art – and we all make art. Whatever our art may be – writing, like Dorothy, dancing, sewing, painting, filming, parenting, cutting hair, going to work, conversation, gardening, etc., ad infinitum – there we have the opportunity to fully embody our femme. We can model full-on, ferocious femme living. Out of adversity and desire for it to be different, out of honesty and not being willing to capitulate, we can stay true to the queer femme heartbeat that powers our queer femme bodies. In doing so, we shine that light into the world, and we are capable of reaching and boosting up other queer femmes. Not just femmes, either, but other queers who themselves may be desperate to see examples of genuine, uncompromising queer lives. We can resolve to stop protecting straight people with our silence, our embarrassed smiles, our forgiveness. We can resolve never to pander to straight people again, whatever that may look like for the particularities of our lives, even if it’s just a very slight attitude shift or giving deliberate and daily care to keeping a protective shield around our soul. We can resolve to be beacons to the queerlings* we encounter, even if we just pass them on the street one rainy day downtown when we’re out on a date or simply running an errand.
In our despair, our loneliness, our isolation, we may have trouble seeing how amazing we are, how our femme magic gifts the world every single fucking day. Femme sisters, and I do not use that term lightly, little only child that I am; Femme Sisters, shine for yourselves. Shine for your Sisters. Feed your femme fire with love and community and art and queer culture.
There is nothing more powerful than a flamingly visible loved version of a queer femme life.
Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is what it means to have no loved version of your life but the one you make. –Dorothy Allison
*the young ‘uns! (thank you to E., from Queer Mystic, for this excellent designation!)
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.
The Total Femme 