Meditations for Queer Femmes — Sad, No, Make that BOUNTIFUL Queer Stories!

Still feeling literary and looking forward to discussing Gabby Rivera’s profound and profoundly sweet novel Juliet Takes a Breath tomorrow evening with our fabulous Queer Book Group, and I’ve been thinking about queer stories.

The other day, when a friend handed me back the copy of A Scarlet Pansy I had lent him, he said happily, “I just loved how Fay had tons of entirely ‘dissolute’ sex all his life, with little to no repercussions!” Indeed, Fay the hero/heroine of Robert Scully’s 1932 novel, has everyone drooling over him, straight or gay, and beds a lovely bevy of fellas with great abandon. He is neither punished nor shamed for this, but rather takes it as his queenly due. Did you catch the date? That was 1932.

So I am wondering about the heavy legacy of what is supposed to be our literary due. Is it really true that all queer lit until our enlightened ages was sad and miserable? That no queer character lived happily ever after until The Price of Salt or Rubyfruit Jungle? E.M. Forester kept Maurice from being published until the early 1970s, and he wrote it in 1912! If a well-known author was writing happy queer stories and keeping them in file drawers, there must be oodles of other books by less-well-known authors out there!

Denying ourselves a history of happy queer lives reflected in literature seems to me to be another way we are robbing ourselves and allowing ourselves to be bullied by the status quo. As soon as we buy into the idea that unless we’re “normal” we are destined for heartbreak, we lose ourselves, we lose connection to a more complicated, layered and happy history that surely is available. Perhaps hidden, perhaps written down in a corking code using Ancient Greek and algebra, like those fabulous secret diaries of the randy Miss Anne Lister, perhaps otherwise misplaced or overlooked, but waiting to be found again and with us nonetheless.

Sarah Waters brazenly and wonderfully makes up an intricate queer past where queers are real people, have full and rewarding lives, along with lots of sex and adventure. What a gift it is when artists queer the queer story! Speaking of which, we can also go back and do a little revisionist work on some of the lugubrious classics, like for example, what if Mary, the femme from The Well of Loneliness, cruelly betrayed by Stephen, gets to Canada with the odious Martin, ditches him and makes her way to an early version of wimmin’s land run by a motely crew of dykes with survival skills and no use for the fellas?*

All our queer voices must have a place, and all our queer stories are precious and important. I am just thinking that there is a reason that many of the extremely difficult stories are given more room than the ones starting with a healthy queer life and going from there.

Juliet Takes a Breath is one of those stories – and am I mistaken, or is the young protagonist more than just a smidge femme?? – and I am so fucking grateful! “I want my work to be centered in joy,” says Gabby Rivera, who is also the writer for Marvel’s America, featuring America Chavez, the first queer Latinx hard femme superheroine.

Centered in joy. Oh, purr!

*Could a femme please write that, please? And if you’ve already written it, could you please let me know??

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.

Published in: on December 12, 2017 at 3:17 PM  Comments (3)  
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Making Queer Culture – Meditation for Queer Femmes

The presidency of Trump has given those of us who might have been in a gentle slumber an opportunity to wake up. We have always needed the shared strength of other queers, from the homophile movement to combatting indifference to our health concerns, especially in regards to AIDS. Not only do we need each other’s individual wisdom, humor and support, we need to be lifted up by our queer culture.

At the National Day of Mourning this year, several of the speakers shared stories about ancestors coming to them in dreams. That gift is only available when a people has deep, cellular knowledge of their own cultural heritage. We queers need the knowledge of our own queer cultural heritage. We need the strength that comes from knowing our own unique art and literature and humor and cuisine. We need the strength of our forebears as well as that of queers of all ages. Gathering our people around us to make and partake of queer culture will give us the strength we need.

So throw a themed dinner party. Start a queer salon. Request that your local library sponsor a queer book group (see Arlington, MA’s Robbins Library’s Queer Book Group for inspiration). Do a queer Feed and Read (a potluck combined with reading out loud together the queer story or novel or poetry of your choice). Invite other queers over to watch queer media and/or plan and execute political actions. Plan a femme fashion show or a butch/femme barbeque. A dance, a field trip, a writing group.

We cannot rely on the scraps thrown to us by straight culture, and we cannot afford to wait for better days, because the world needs our queer resistance right now.

We need our ancestors to come to us in dreams.

Every Monday (or Tuesday), 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.

Published in: on February 6, 2017 at 8:21 PM  Leave a Comment  
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Feral Queers

First of all, I’m sorry I left you hanging at a rather suspenseful moment last post! I’m happy to relay that my Dad is fine and both my folks are doing really well.

And now, to our irregularly scheduled blog post:

 

On a recent suburban evening, Tex and I took ourselves off to the local library where we were looking forward to participating in the Queer Book Group run by our simply marvelous local lesbian librarian. We were to discuss Orange is the New Black and for the very first time, Tex had finished the selection and I had not.

 

Imagine our surprise when we got there to discover two earnest straight white ladies sitting at the head of our QBG table with a clipboard and a lot to say. I remembered, just barely, hearing that our fearless lesbian librarian leader had engaged these folks to bring their knowledge about prison activism to our discussion that evening. Tex, however, didn’t have a clue, and was forced to leave the room when one of these horribly entitled, condescending gals sang out, “So, do you want to talk about QUEERS in prison now?” (No, certainly not with you, and plus, you don’t get to say queer, and double plus, you don’t know shit about it, so shut up!)

 

See, me and Tex are kind of feral queers, and when we manage to make it to a queer event, we just want to be with other queers. We live out here in the straight wilderness, having to don protective coloring and full-body armor, dodging homophobic bullets right and left, trying to keep our queer selves and dignity intact and functioning despite the lack of any kind of harbor of decency, and we are fucking tired. It’s desperate for us, no fucking joke.

 

After the straight ladies finally left, Tex voiced so many grumpy complaints that when we got home she had to write an apologetic email to our fabulous lesbian librarian. (“Dude, don’t give it another thought,” came the gracious reply.)

 

I managed to hold it together with the straight ladies, but I am sorry to say that I made the vomit gesture when same fabulous lesbian librarian leader reminded us that we’re reading Rubyfruit Jungle for next time. I hated that anti-butch/femme book (took it quite personally), but who cares? The QBG is so wonderful it doesn’t matter what we’re discussing, but somehow, I still couldn’t stop myself from reacting in this unfiltered fashion.

 

When Tex and I get around other queers these days, we get dangerously amped up. We tend to erupt with loud comments that are often uncouth, poorly timed, and unruly. We sputter, laugh too loudly, and make jokes in dubious taste, startling more decorous queers and potentially ruining our chances of finding new queer friends. Tex says she used to be disciplined in grade school for disrupting class, and that’s exactly how she feels now at QBG. And I’m so desperate for queer culture that any book, film or webseries QBG members recommend or say they’re enjoying, I shout, “IS IT QUEER?” so you might as well call me the queer one-note Sally and, as we know, she usually ends up eating lunch all by herself. Tex and I worry that we are crude, offensive, and generally unfit for polite company.

 

But isn’t it also true that we could all do with more queer love than we’re getting? Surely we’re not alone in this. Yesterday, at the homeschoolers QSA, one of the members related an episode where she bonded with a passing gay boy about her new jellies. She’s a modern queer teen on the go, with a coterie of fabulous friends of all sexualities and genders, and yet sharing a squeal or two with a sweet flaming stranger completely made her day. When she told the story, everyone at the QSA sighed and cooed and nodded and smiled and smiled.

 

We need each other so badly! So give up the sugar, my sisters and brothers. Smile at each other, break out a friendly wink, an air kiss, an understanding grin. Spread the fairy dust and queer up this old world. See each other and gather each other in.

 

 

 

Published in: on November 12, 2014 at 10:34 AM  Comments (3)  
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Al Fresco

Last night as Tex and I emerged from the library where we’d been attending a Queer Book Group event*,  there was a short white man with a very healthy head of 70s-style hair standing on the steps.

“Registered voters!” he called out. “I can spot a couple of registered voters anywhere! I know them when I see them!’

We stopped, and he went on to explain that he and his silent, frozen friend who clutched the clipboard, were collecting signatures in order to put before the upcoming Town Meeting a very, very important issue, namely…outdoor seating. See, local restaurants have just been putting out chairs and tables higgelty piggelty and these two guys feel that unless someone does something quick, all hell will break out.

If anyone had been watching the scene on the library steps last night, I think they would have witnessed two middle-aged queers practically twisting their heads off like 2 extremely perplexed canines. The fellas wanted us to sign a petition about chairs?

Let me back up a moment. For the past, oh, 20 years and perhaps even longer than that, Tex and I have been in the thick of various civil rights struggles, including fighting racism, sexism, ableism, transphobia, homophobia, ageism, you know, that kind of thing. Yesterday, we’d spent most of the afternoon trying to recover from a one-two punch having to do with a straight ally at church offering to do something for the queer group and then reneging in a particularly clueless fashion. And for some reason, perhaps the stars or the season, or my rapidly retreating hormones, I had been feeling particularly small and old that day, and rather unfit for the daunting battles still looming. A person can’t be fired up all the time!

Back to the library steps. We were not at our sharpest (it was almost 9pm, after all) but we both immediately got very suspicious. I wondered if this guy was working for the Man, sneakily trying to curtail workers’ rights. Tex assumed the worst and thought the guy’s elderly aunt had been pushed out into the street by unruly seating arrangements and done in by a passing car. Finally, we snapped out of it, asked a few questions, like, is this a public safety issue and how did you become interested in this (yes, and he just thinks there should be some regulation before everyone just starts doing whatever they want), and in the end, we both signed. It was just some signatures so that Town Meeting considers the proposal.

This morning we checked in with each other: had it been a dream? aliens posing as humans, slightly behind in their fashion research? the shared hallucination of two hard-working queer activists brought on by the afore mentioned sucker punch? I guess we won’t know until Town Meeting, but the thing is, as my dear friend in Chile reminded me: there are other issues, you know. And sometimes, they involve al fresco dining.

What a world!**

*our town has a Lesbian Librarian! She started a Queer Book Group! It’s so much fun!!!

**Some of you may know that this is a direct quote from Chet, who is the dog half of the Chet and Bernie mystery series by Spencer Quinn – a Total Femme fave!

Published in: on January 30, 2014 at 9:56 PM  Leave a Comment  
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