Nothing Can Be Said of Being Butch

A queer friend in graduate school told me about being questioned about the absence of butches and the visibility of trans masculinity in queer community. The question came from a lesbian professor at a private university.

“Where have all the butches gone?” First, I refute you thus: I am butch and I'm here, responding. Second, I would prefer to unravel the question than answer it.

There is a saying, “Nothing can be said about the Tao.” To say one thing is to exclude another. Merely to use the word “butch” excludes some of the people who are invested. To decide against using the word excludes some other people who are certainly also invested here too. To take any action toward concrete knowledge excludes other possibilities and truths. I am tempted to refer to those involved as stakeholders- people whose identities and truths may be included or excluded by our definitions and decisions. I prefer this approach because it suggests that we consider everyone with a sincere interest rather than everyone who has the correct identity.

The act of defining an identity excludes other possible definitions. To give up the desire for linguistic precision allows for a more comprehensive explanation of the concept of butch than any conventional define-defend-conclude style of discourse ever could. I am not going to define masculinity or butch or genderqueer or any other terms here. My attachment to these concepts is too great and too dearly held. I want to let go. I’m now convinced the best and healthiest and most liberating thing I can do is to take up the identity question more lightly than ever.

I identify as a woman, the same gender I was assigned at birth. Yet when I looked up the words "woman-identified-butch,” most everything I found was transphobic towards trans men, trans women, or trans* everyone. Seeking other butch women online brought me to a bottomless stinking cesspool of transphobic hate and self-loathing. If there is any singular phenomenon causing queer people to no longer identify as butch, it may very well be the stench of transphobia.

The truth is I myself do not personally know many butch-identified people at all, and sometimes I think I’m only holding on to the word for sentimental reasons. It’s one of those words I’ve looked at so many times that I’ve lost the sense for whether it is even spelled correctly, let alone means anything.

As opposed to naming an identity, living in the world with my actual masculinity is something I've grappled with my entire life, and yet also done effortlessly or even sometimes accidentally. I aim for self-acceptance rather than self-loathing or self-esteem, both of which have their flaws. Self-loathing is miserable, self-esteem was attractive at first and got me through some hard times but falls apart when it comes time to take risks or make mistakes or learn new things. When I get my self-acceptance right, my masculine self-expression includes adoring women, being feminist, and being at peace in my body. Where my self-acceptance can sometimes get derailed is when I’m someplace like the Philadelphia Trans Health Conference and I have this alarm bell going off in my head, screaming “no.” Some part of my brain becomes obsessed with reminding me I’m not a trans man and I’m not really an outside-the-binary genderqueer either, so what am I doing here or anywhere, ever. Not to mention it becomes challenging to interact socially and behave somewhat human when a fire alarm is sounding in your head at top volume. So I spent as much if not more time sitting by myself or with loved ones near the conference as I spent in the conference.

A similar yet more nauseous alarm often sounds “fuck no, not like that, never like that” when I read butch/femme anthologies, or blogs, or pretty much any lesbian narratives about being butch. Yet somehow still I keep the word, always insisting I can be butch in my own way. All these alarms are aggravating! It is noise pollution that no one else can hear. But I kind of have to just hear them and continue to insist I belong somewhere in every queer, lesbian and trans masculine community anyway.

***

But back to our professor and the disappearing butch: The only real points I would want to make to her are that gender is informed by class and that there are some observable changes to masculinity in the larger culture that inform queer masculinity too.

In an alternate universe, the same professor might similarly find herself wondering where all the cowboys have gone. I'm skeptical about the idea that there ever were many working class butches on this professor’s college campus, or for that matter, many men who express that same kind of masculinity. I wonder if she feels lonely or is trying to imagine whom she would want to date if she were her student’s age. I wonder if she sees nerdy butch college students as butch, or if I’m guessing accurately and she is actually looking for working class masculinity in all the wrong places. Where I grew up, masculinity included going to work, paying the bills, then spending the weekend fixing your busted car and drinking beer or doing yard work. I hated the incredible conservatism I grew up around but I can’t deny the influence of the men who were directly in front of me during my formative years.

Though he has changed these habits now, during my childhood my father used to drink himself to sleep in front of the TV every night and work on one of those jug-sized gallo wines all weekend. He liked to spend time alone and believed that filtered cigarettes were as pointless as decaffeinated coffee. He taught me gun safety and handling when I was tiny and even now at 77 he takes me to the firing range sometimes. Don’t mistake this for a sentimental relationship, I learned misogyny and homophobia from him too and we still keep our distance. Do the daughters of men like this usually end up at private liberal arts colleges in the classes of lesbian professors? If you aren’t finding any butches, maybe your school needs to provide more scholarships, maybe you are looking in the wrong place, and maybe your butch template is outdated.

***

Butches do not exist in a vacuum, just being born and expressing masculinity the same way as we did in the past forever and ever into the future. Part of the reason masculinity in the larger culture has changed is that a lot of it is so profoundly unhealthy and destructive.  A lot of it is embedded patriarchy and misogyny, and there’s been some improvement in those areas. Obama made it OK for a big manly world leader to be an affectionate dad and even relax a little around gayness. When I have the opportunity to spend time with straight black men and boys in my education work environment, I can see the impact of his influence everywhere. And for a few decades now, some white men, in some places, are learning from feminism and don't express their masculinity the same way our fathers did. I’m not saying feminism won here, just acknowledging some small victories. Some of those wealthy white third wave straight women got their husbands to push the stroller and change diapers, and it’s something. On top of that, lots of liberal white men are constantly being infantilized in movies and TV where hyper competent women care for them in exchange for being taught how to laugh. And there are all the man-child movies too. Bottom line is the John Wayne shit I was raised with doesn't fly in all circles anymore, and no one’s masculinity exists in a bubble, let alone butch masculinity.

I imagine that butches grow into our masculinity in our own ways, but in some ways similarly to how boys and men do, by mirroring the men who we see in our lives, the media, and in the larger culture. We reflect the aspects of masculinity expressed by the men we admire, or maybe more often, the men we wished would be around. My relationships with cis and trans men provide a constant stream of what to do and what not to do, in terms of expressing masculinity. There’s a feedback loop in my relationships with men, and I’m pretty sure some guys I’ve been really close with have had their masculinity informed by mine as well. And there is a part of me that relates to straight cis men much more closely than I often care to admit, how about that for some dirty laundry.

I have done some hard work to leave the macho baggage behind. Lately I want to talk about my feelings all the time! In fact I’m doing it right now! I'm not the least bit concerned this makes me less masculine. The reason I bring this up is because I'm slightly concerned that when people bemoan the disappearing butch, they might be looking for some unhealthy qualities in a kind of nostalgic utopianism about how butches used to be. I don't long for the substance abuse or bar fights or pissing contests or competing with men. I don't aspire to stoicism or have shit to prove. I refuse to romanticize anyone being stone as much as I refuse to pathologize it. And I've never been cool, detached or tough, and what a relief it was to stop trying. I’m thinking of a dyke I used to know who got nerve damage in her hand from punching a wall. I’m thinking of my own swollen knuckles the time I punched a trash can on a subway platform ten years ago. That’s not butch, it’s idiotic, but thankfully it motivated me to get some much-needed therapy. I am in no way nostalgic for all that rage seething beneath the hardened exterior. It was miserable. It may have made me appear more butch on the surface but I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, nor would I wish for more of it to be in our community.

***

Yet it’s actually a good thing this professor asked her question. The queer theory or activist style answer might be to send her to do her own research and overcome her ignorance. My first draft of this response included resources and shout-outs to Bklyn Boihood and Cathy Opie and Butch Voices. But doing research all by oneself doesn't always help. Maybe it was actually wiser to ask for help from my queer comrade, however clumsy the question might be. Real learning is often a social activity.

Obviously I am more interested in this conversation as a lens for my own journey with gender. The butch/trans border lives and breathes in my body. I will defend this professor’s right to question that blurry border with good intentions, if that is indeed what she is attempting to do. If we are to be a healthy community, we need to have a dialogue. I don't want to live with an elephant in the room. I want to have this conversation with all the people who are stakeholders.

I want her to be able to ask this crappy, tedious question and not have it shut down with a stack of books and websites. I believe it is possible to have this conversation without being transphobic, but there are a lot of pitfalls along the way. We must take care not to end up in the Gendercator.

On one hand, there has to be a better way to respond to the persistent question of the supposedly disappearing butch. On the other hand, there has to be a better way to value masculinity in women than being a transphobic fucking idiot.

It occurs to me the professor is asking this question because she feels grief and loss over the changes to lesbian culture and the blurring of its identity boundaries. That blurring is something that makes me freer, so if it is causing her a problem, maybe I should ignore her and live my life. But freeing as the blur is, it’s still not entirely unproblematic for me either. Her question makes me angry and sympathetic at the same time. And I could just respond by pointing to the excellent essay by Amy Fox in Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme  but I’d rather go on engaging myself here. (If there is any hope for us all, it lies with butches like Amy Fox.)

I could not help but wonder if our professor goes around asking this question of all her young students in our stakeholder group. And what impact questions like this might have. If people don't feel comfortably butch, they shouldn't feel any obligation to identify with it. Please don't pressure young queer people to fit into a model that isn't working for them! Formal authority has an amplifying affect. When you are a professor and go around your campus asking why there are no more butches, it has an impact on young queer people who trust and respect you. It might even make them feel inadequate. Then they get resentful of the pressure you are putting on them to live up to some imaginary ideal/outdated butch standard just because they have a little bit of masculinity in their complex identity. I doubt you would ask tender young cis men to be more masculine or anything other than what they are. It would be painful for any human to have their gender evaluated, but if feels like betrayal when it comes from a trusted queer professor. And then later your students graduate and move to Brooklyn and I get to feel alienated at the big gay party because my butchness triggers some paradigm of gender failure that you enforced with your not-so-innocent questions, then they act all weird and uncomfortable around me. No thank you.

***

So now let’s acknowledge an increase in visibility for trans masculinity. Part of what I think has changed with the increased visibility is not a decrease in the number of butches but arguably a shift in the surrounding environment. Where before our gender was observed in the context of femme genders and against het genders, now the context also includes trans men. Where before we were perceived as the “real” lesbians now we are perceived as the ”not real” trans men. Both of those constructions suck ass. I can’t think of any examples of where “realness” is used without dehumanizing somebody through comparison.

The context changes and the community struggles to evolve (or fall apart, or just yell about how we are not all one community, or turn cynical and claim there has never been a community.) Some queers deserve some credit for creating a lot of space and acknowledgement for trans masculinity. At the same time, we are struggling to evolve in another way with our massive transphobia and misogyny towards trans women. And even in evolving towards being more inclusive of trans men, we also sometimes get sloppy and started attaching male pronouns and conventional trans narratives to everyone presenting as masculine. That's a mistake and it sometimes feels erasing, at least it is to me when I’m the one being mistaken... but I’m not offended, I understand why it happens. Like most other movements, our evolution is erratic and thriving in some areas but stunted in others. The people on the receiving end are usually those with the compound marginalized identities, and when the fuck will we ever learn?

The idea that butches are pressured to transition should be given some air and light. Instead of dismissing it as transphobic nonsense, which it very well may be, I still want to sit with it for a while. I need to consider if I am experiencing internal or external pressure to transition, or both. Usually this conversation leads someplace where my agency is taken away and I am somehow the property of vigilant lesbians who deep down actually believe I would transition in a heartbeat if they let me get away with it. Or that trans guys are pressuring me simply by going around with all that annoying hard-won self-acceptance and comfort in their own skin.

Let’s take our question to one of the experts for a moment. "Now there is a visible community of transgender men. There are now fewer masculine women as the shift is away from that "in between" position. Female masculinity is seen as a step towards transitioning and the transition is seen as a way to resolve the discomfort of female masculinity for some. A young person coming out now has much more images of trans men to choose from, and there is less stigma around that choice." This is J. Halberstam being interviewed in Diva magazine. 

I am so impressed by this authoritative declaration of facts! But unfortunately I was not called for the gender census and was not aware that we know for a fact that there are fewer masculine women these days. I see masculine of center people all the time because I live in Brooklyn and work in Newark. I see studs most everywhere, so with the evidence before my eyes I must question the idea that there are fewer of us masculine women. While it is indeed true that there are now more images, and ways to access information about physical transition and more trans narratives and more unconventional trans narratives, we probably cannot ever know just how many people are in an actual identity at a given time.

I don’t experience pressure from trans men to transition and I do not have any illusions that passing would resolve the stress of being a masculine woman. (Besides, that stress forged me.) On the contrary, what I actually experience is a form of adult peer pressure. Here is how it works: Certain gender identities are celebrated in the community. Celebrating queer genders can be deeply subversive, fun, sexy and empowering. But we don’t always get celebration right. We are all at least somewhat traumatized by oppression and that can totally fuck with our capacity to look, notice, and see each other. We end up with this sloppy validation where the celebration starts to smell like popularity and favoritism instead of affirmation or inclusion. All the celebration starts to feel like tediously repetitive self-congratulation and tramples right over some of the folks it supposedly aims to include.

We get sloppy when we assume any masculine-presenting person is trans. This happens to me occasionally when it's assumed that I am on my way to some other identity, when I get weird back-handed compliments about how I'd make a hot guy. I've gotten that one from gay men, both cis and trans. It's OK, I know it is meant well, but it's a sloppy celebration of trans masculinity that erases the fact that I'm a woman… a fact that isn't temporary or transitory. So occasionally an effort to respect trans masculinity is disrespectful to me as a butch. I do not hold this against trans men, but our community needs to take some responsibility for not automatically assuming my masculinity means that I’m trans. We need to improve on just listening and noticing each other better all around.

On the contrary to a celebration of trans masculinity, I’ve observed an increasingly popular and very specific narrative around glitter and fabulousness expressed by trans masculine people and any and all other queers. Having a sparkly gender on a boyish identity is constantly being admired, photographed, blogged about, and equated with being queer. This celebration sets an expectation that really stresses me out! I can no more play with being glittery and feminine now than I could play with ribbons or be girly as a child. I am not going to playfully undermine my masculinity in order to meet some new standard for belonging. I’m not boyish or effeminate or dapper or dandy, either. And I love my radical faeries but I am not one. The new peer pressure feels entirely too similar to what I experienced as a kid, like constant disappointment in my perceived drabness/lack of femininity. It feels like my mom urging me to wear more color or teachers telling me to smile.

I imagine that when one identifies as a man it might get tiresome to be expected to constantly undermine one's own masculinity with glitter or nail polish in order to be understood as having good gender politics. I imagine that it would be a huge pain in the ass to be in queer community space as a man because sometimes I can barely stand it as a butch. This is not to assume that all trans masculine people ID as men, but only to point out that trans men per se are not being celebrated and neither is masculinity per se. What is being celebrated is a very particular way of presenting oneself as beyond the binary. Sometimes I imagine this is what it is like to be femme, to show up with your femininity but not be recognized because you are not dressed sufficiently slutty or because you are not subverting or undermining or playing with femininity but actually living in it.

My freedom doesn't resemble boyish wonder, or flamboyant in-between gender worlds, but it is no less my freedom. It looks like being grown up and masculine, every single day and not only in queer community but also in corporate environments, schools and non-profits, just being a butch woman.

So "radical queers" need to stop demanding conformity in exchange for recognition. We probably want so much to belong to something that we mistake sameness for community. That's a tragic error, because healthy communities affirm difference.

I think the pressure of these queer expectations comes from a misplaced desire to celebrate ourselves, to feel good about ourselves and so on. We screw things up because we are going for self-esteem rather than self-affirmation. So then what does my own self-affirming gender freedom even look like? Not like the emotionally crippled masculinity I grew up with, and not like the mushy white liberal masculinity in our pop culture. Not the retro butch tuxedo situation, much as I respect that as groundbreaking. Again I have to come back to just being free to be butch the way I like it, accept it, then I won’t need to look to others to celebrate my gender, I won’t need to hate myself, I won’t have to swing on that pendulum at all anymore.

We need to do a better job with noticing one another. We need to get out of our own heads and struggles with identity to actually see the people right in front of us. Beyond just asking for everyone’s pronouns, I often wonder what it would be like if we were actually attending to each other and what it will mean to be in community together. We could do each other a real service towards liberation to just calm down and notice.

***

I need options. I need to live in this body and this identity before I can speak to anyone’s anxiety about lesbian gender identity expression. I may seek physical changes to make my body into a place I can enjoy more and occupy whole-heartedly or with some degree of ease. Ease! It took me a long time to think I had any claim to that, with all the body dysphoria in our drinking water. I may alter my body to remain a masculine female who can live with herself. Not to transition to anywhere but to remain standing right here. Even at risk of queer people in my community thinking they knew it all along about me. Even at risk of straight people having less of a sense of what to make of me. Even at risk of confirming some fears that all the butches are disappearing.

What I chose to do with my body is up to me. I won't have lesbians read me as a self-mutilating betrayer and trans people/cis men/radical queers read me as a man or an incompletely transitioned guy. Or maybe I will have all that, since I have certainly had it all before. In fact, people can believe any or all of those things but it doesn’t stick. If people can’t find me on the map they may need to put it down and navigate the actual landscape. But I will help with that navigation since I want to be seen and understood as much as anyone else does.

I feel so relieved that it is possible for me to make physical changes. I am so grateful it is possible even if I never do it. It makes me feel better about being butch. It makes it easier for me to relate to the disappearing butch questions with compassion. There are trans men who choose no hormones and no surgery, and have no less right to their identity for this choice. Conversely I'm a butch woman who may very well choose hormones and/or top surgery, and I am no less a butch for these decisions. Identity doesn’t lie with these physical interventions any more than with the words we choose.

Either way I’m still just straddling the line on this imaginary border. And thinking about how the blurry border, and these discussions, and offensive questions, all arose as a consequence of people trying to have their own visible, nameable identity and understand others through a visible, namable identity. People want to be seen for what we are, and feel human and connected and understood. Much as I obviously love a lengthy discourse on gender, I think we can actually accomplish the connection and understanding through being more attentive in community and by loosening up on the boundary definitions. The words can point to the truth about us but they can never actually be the truth. 

Titans

In October 2011, Helene Cixous, Judith Butler and Avital Ronell came to New York and gave a panel called Disruptive Kinship. In December 2011, Ron Athey and Julie Tolentino came to New York and gave a talk and a performance. 

Ron Athey 

•    Influenced by Throbbing Gristle making a collage

•    Translating visual images into live performances

•    Five hits of acid and whiskey

•    Facing the grotesque

•    St Sebastian. Mishima brought me to him. Always revived during times of plague.

•    Drawing a graph of AIDS, a long journey from immanent death to Frankenstein drugs.

•    Post AIDS, what does it mean.

•    Images in response to people's death

Helene Cixous

•    We expect that we will listen in an affinitive way, with hospitality. In a kind of in translation that permeates body and soul.

•    Matter does not exist without interaction. Between atoms there are interactions. One would wish this would happen between living beings.

•    Things that interact become one, like with gluons, in between. Not only among humans. Translating into other species. Not having affinities before. My mother became a kind of cat. She expresses herself catly.

Julie Tolentino

•    Finding my way through activism. Training as an activist, I understood this as a dancer, the deep spaces of relationship

•    Clit Club multi race and multi class

•    Friends disappearing. Going to ACT UP but also trying to find artistic outlets

•    Memorial work that was personal and not performed.

This is a test. Can I hang with the graduate school lecture crowd, being a garden variety intellectual with a state college education?

Judith Butler 

•    Forms of kinship that are disruptive, what are they meant to disrupt?

•    Kinship a way of ordering relationships? Reordering one that needs disruption?

•    Or maybe kinship rests upon a certain disruption.

•    Kinship emerged in feminist anthropology to ask about exceeding the family.

•    Modes of intimate alliance that take neither conjugality or reproduction as their means.

•    Not all intimate bonds are kin, so how do we distinguish?

•    Foundering on the categories.

•    Do we only know them through the breach? Nexus of greek tragedy.

•    At what moments does one get recognized as or become kin?

•    Oedipus could not recognize mother or father, or at least not consciously.

•    Drum one's own subconscious if one is to make sense of kinship.

Ron Athey

•    I forget sometimes I worked with a cast of 25 before I ever did solo. Not a minimalist.

•    Understanding the flesh and navigating it differently.

Avital Ronell 

•    The traumatic way in which we bind to each other

•    Pulling together, we show up in what severs and cuts describing us. Cut to each others size.

•    Stuck with old names and old ways of naming. You may want to advance but language lassos us back. Limits us.

•    Without is connected in-stoppably to with. Even if there is a severance, we are still WITHout. A structure that holds us.

•    Why do we say "all alone"? Isn't it shitty enough to be "alone"?

•    Elective affinities. A question of how people might relate in ways that cannot be substantialized.

•    Adoptions, enrollments, offering a dismal set of nonstarters.

Thought about my kinship with my former coworkers, how these relationships were not friendship or family. But the breaking apart that happens in lay-offs, a forceful disruption of affiliation, it has an impact on our society, to have so many people who have experienced being let go, having their attachment to colleagues severed. I mean, I had an especially emotional attachment to my coworkers after processing so much around racism and homophobia and exclusivity and so much more that was in the air in our work, then suddenly I'm ass out and all those problems are none of my concern anymore. I loved these people who were not my friends or family. But even with people you don't like that much, seeing them every day they grow on you and you don’t want to be parted from them. Maybe it is in our nature to grow attached to those around us. At least I know it's in my nature. What are the psychic implications of having the relational disruption of lay-offs happen on a massive scale across the country?

Julie Tolentino 

•    Supposedly you are learning about your body in dance... but if you keep exploring you learn an inside-out understanding of what it can do and how it can change... challenging your body to go to a place where you don't know what you have... making changes in modes, duration, embedded texts

•    Rope containing myself and containing the situation so it does not become spectacle

Wealth and whiteness of the New School crowd and the Kara Walker installation on stairwell, as we waited to see Butler, Cixous, Ronell we stood by silhouettes of slavery’s horrors among students with individualistic eyewear. 

Ron Athey

•    Presented as a living corpse. Dead yet sexualized. Elements of sex show in non-sexy way.

Helene Cixous

•    Myths are with us all the time, we are them.

•    Maybe we do not want to think or believe that murder and family are similar. We prefer to think family is love, but love is also murder.

•    It is terrible to be of the same blood. Even if we do not think in those terms, it is with us.

•    When I kill my kind, I shed my own blood. And blood does not climb back into the veins.

•    When you kin with other work, related to predecessors and those who will follow. Intertextuality. Graft other works inside the work. When you read Proust, the whole of french lit is there. Swallowed and thrown up, preserved and buried. You can adore the other without killing, if you swallow the other, you can't kill somebody who is dead, which is why I prefer to deal with fictitious people, dead people.

•    There is enough distance between us for us to be close without biting one another.

I was dog sick during the talk and bodily fluids were about to escape me. Not to mention I could have simply taken out my tampon to instantly make this a more bloody happening.

Avital Ronell

•    Aversion of the gaze, evasion. At the very moment you want to acknowledge a profound proximity.

•    When does it get too close or too far, when you think you are really close you might have abysses to clear.

•    New York was invaded by the united states of america 10 years ago

•    You're so cute I want to eat you up.

Judith Butler

•    Transference systems link us and tear us apart

•    When we undergo transference, we get signed up.

•    Transfer and transform and transference

•    Finding oneself transformed into something else.

•    Iterability defined by its ruptures and elaborations

Wanting so much more about personal connections and loneliness, the most striking thing was brief mentions of loneliness. No, the most striking thing was Helene Cixous discussion of her relationship with Derrida, where he insisted he was connected to death and she was connected to life, and she always said inside NO but he was so insistent that she started to identify with it despite herself.

Julie Tolentino

•    Take a signature work and archive it into my body.

•    To curate work I want to see, here are the five artists I am interested in.

Ron Athey

•    Post AIDS. How many dead people I know, guilt that I don't keep them simmering somehow.

Judith Butler

•    Kinship beyond the blood but also the metaphor of blood, the most fictive moment in ethnography

•    Differences between adopting, grafting & cannibalizing

•    Interactions that produce metamorphosis of another kind

Julie Tolentino

•    I really do appreciate seeing my body joining Occupy Wall Street. I'm interested in how the local is coming through. More issues around race are coming up because people are trying to find ways to be together. To be a body on the line with my full experience.

•    I even said in the performance- I'm bleeding- carpeted the room and described where the cutting would happen. All the things you cannot do. I did a cutting before the performance while you were giving your pre-performance talk

Ron Athey

•    Economy of self mutilation. Boxing is OK, sport is OK, I'd rather be mutilated than punched

•    Bodily fluids are here right now, just beneath the skin

Community Action Center

Community Action Center is screening at MIX 24 on Sunday, November 20 at 3 PM. 

This screening will probably be sold out because every thinking, feeling woman in NYC who has any interest in lesbian sexuality will be there. Every lesbian in NYC will be there to watch and discuss CAC because exactly how often do we get to see explicit images of dyke sex on a big screen with an audience full of queers? Almost never! 

Year round at MIX NYC we leave no stone unturned in our desire to provide our audience with access to images of women fucking. Images that were not designed to be sold, not designed for straight wankers, and god help us, not designed to educate anyone. Because we know we can do better than all that. We can do better. Every dyke in this city needs to see this film and talk about it with her lovers and exes and BFFs and even with dykes she hasn't met yet. We need more dialogue about sexuality, and we need to have it in public places, not just in our homes and parties. Not just on our blogs and various online feeds. Not just those of us who publicly write about sex online but those of us who privately think about sex all the time. We need to sit together in the dark with other lesbians and watch 69 minutes of porn, and look at pussies and assholes and and dildoes and nipples then stay there and then discuss it together. Stay right the fuck there and talk about it. 

Whether it is to say, "Oh I was turned on by the scene by the railroad tracks," or "Oh this doesnt represent me, I don't see anyone with my body type here" and "Oh, I don't ever want to have sex like in that one scene, but I liked the piercing," and so on and on. Love it or hate it, pornography made by and about lesbians is too important to ignore. Because Jesus Fucking Christ, there is a real dearth of this material. And there is not enough of this dialogue. And you know deep down lesbians always want to talk about the politics of representation while thinking about getting it on. And of course you can look at videos online all day but you will not find anything like this and besides, you will be at home looking at your computer and what is that all about anyway? 

In utopia, a diverse and inclusive community of queers of all genders watch porn together all the time. In the real world, cisgender fags should see this film too. So many dykes I know watch gay porn because we love you and your sex turns us on. And suffice it to say that our watching pornography together is powerful. Every step we take towards better understanding of each other improves us. (That does not mean you can look at, comment upon or touch my boobs.) 

We often want to start our community building conversations in identity and movement aspirations. Maybe grounding our conversation in the pleasures and displeasures, the politics and erotics of looking, can get us started too. How are overlapping identities represented? How does inclusion work in friendship as well as in community as well as in screen time?

Community Action Center self-consciously takes up the challenges of representation that are a huge part of feminist discourse associated with what is commonly referred to as the second wave of feminism. By locating some of the scenes in nature, CAC connects itself to a tradition of cultural feminism around the feminine being rooted in nature and the earth, being all wild and ritualistic and so on. In the 1980s lesbian porn had titles like Erotic in Nature, and even straight mainstream porn with lesbian themes was often on the arty side. The S/M scenes in CAC bring to mind the feminist schism of the 1990s where S/M and pornography were hotly debated and feminism painfully struggled to contain and sustain disagreement, to become large enough to hold contradictions. So many of the same challenges have been hanging around in lesbian pornography since we started the problematic project of controlling our own images and asking whether objectification could be done without dehumanization. CAC often takes these themes over the edge, going just that one step further. With the images like the archetypal witch and her literal broomstick ride, CAC overstates the problem of feminist representation of women's sexuality and reminds us of the lengthy history of this debate. Is there a way out of the conundrum of being the object of desire and the desire to be more than an object? The feminist project of liberation is alive and well here, as CAC surfaces this puzzle with equal parts earnestness and irony. 

There is a tone of serious parody that I personally enjoyed a lot about the film. The pizza boy from the straight porn world makes a guest appearance. So does a busty woman washing a car, in a kind of classic tacky erotica tribute that goes on long enough to make you think repeatedly about what exactly you are seeing here. What is the meaning of invoking these images, in a way that is simultaneously humorous and humorless? What about pubic hair that is long enough to braid? A send up on the idea of feminists and lesbians being humorless, here we have the comedic and the dead-serious appearing simultaneously.

So mark your calendar for the CAC screening. Right by where you marked for when you are expecting your period, or going to therapy, or your haircut. Brace yourself to see some dyke sex for real. Because if we don't watch this now, how can we be sure work like this will keep getting made? If we don't show up to see images of ourselves, who the fuck will? We are not seeing shit like this on TV or cable or the movies. If our sexuality never leaves the confines of our apartments, does it really make a sound? What are you so busy doing, anyway? Assembling lists of suggestively homoerotic scenes from otherwise straight pop culture? Replaying the scene where Shane fucks Rosanna Arquette with a strap-on? Watching your well-worn VHS tape of Bound? Rifling through old issues of Leg Show?

Public dyke sex is critical not only for our liberation, but also just to have our own sexuality and dialogue about it and to have that documented and real and public and collaborative and important and prioritized and of course critical, and of course political, we are dykes after all, aren't we? So I don't give a fuck if you already saw this on a loop in a gallery, and I don't care if you already saw it at the center or in park slope. I don't care if you loved it and can't wait to see it again or if you jerked off or if it made you uncomfortable or if it offended you or even if you found it pretentious. I'm not asking you to take your pants off though you are welcome to, but just to show the fuck up and watch some women get it on. Just get your ass to this screening. Every dyke in NYC needs to be there because prioritizing our pleasure, our bodies and our sex lives is revolutionary. And at a time when the state and its corporate masters are shutting down our speech and regulating where, when and how our bodies may meet and assemble, it might do us some good to assemble around the body itself and all its potential pleasures.

The Invisible Shield

I have been working in the education sector since 1999. In the past four years I have been laid off from two jobs, first at a for-profit then at a non-profit. At my last full-time job, there was this video of a high school lesson on how diseases spread, focused on HIV. The video was chosen by folks at the top of the organization to be used as an example mediocre lesson to be critiqued. The content of the lesson was inaccurate and full of misconceptions about HIV/AIDS, the kind of scare-tactic misinformation that makes infection seem inevitable and unavoidable. The lesson was also poorly taught, which is why it was chosen. It did not occur to the people who selected it that the video might get a reaction out of anyone with a personal experience of HIV/AIDS, by distracting, angering, insulting or just annoying them. They might not be able see and critique the lesson clearly through all the bullshit.

Two straight white women selected this video, a mid and upper level manager. They must never have really thought about what it is like to be positive, or to have a parent or a lover or a friend with HIV/AIDS. How else could they fail to notice the content? This is how heterosupremacism protects straight people from seeing reality that is not even outside their experience or world, but just right outside their cubicle. We worked in the same office but in different realities. Unknowing participation in the day-to-day hetero-centric power dynamics allows straight people to get by without taking responsibility for their homophobia. Privilege forms a shield of ignorance that deflects responsibility for the harm that others experience through unwittingly homophobic actions. This shield is itself an instrument of homophobia, no less so for being invisible to the people it is protecting. The protection likely makes it easier to consistently plead ignorance than to take responsibility for learning about homophobia.

It made me go a little crazy to watch the reality I live in and know so well not be given a moment’s consideration. Our team managed to block the video from being used by arguing that it would create a disadvantage for anyone whose life had been impacted by HIV/AIDS. A modified version was used instead. Considering the NYC schools and neighborhoods we worked in and served, that adds up to a lot of people. The thing that was so stunning about this experience was the extent to which something so central to my experience was so nonexistent to the people running the organization I worked in. I felt betrayed because I had trusted that forward thinking educators were forward thinking in other areas too. My trust was misplaced.

And all this really illuminates the protection afforded to some straight people by heterosupremacism. It is the delusion of being morally good even in the very moment when they are excluding anyone outside of their privileged circle. They fall back on their good intentions and persist in ignorance. In contrast, straight people who have personal experiences with HIV/AIDS lose their ignorance, in that they literally cannot ignore HIV/AIDS. They come into contact with a form of stigmatization related to sex and the body that more privileged straight people never experience. It would be easier to separate out all the different forms of privilege, to make this simple, but that would do a disservice to the people who were on my team at work, all of whom are straight, some are white, more are black, some single and some married. They don’t spend time with lots of queer people besides me, but they also don’t go around in a stupor thinking no one they know has HIV/AIDS. They live in a world that includes people with AIDS and know it is not neutral content for assessing good and bad instruction. We all work in schools in neighborhoods with disproportionately high impact. So their access to heterosupremacist privilege intersects with race and/or class and/or geography and is consequently limited in this particular context. We were all severely pissed off about the selection of this video and took effective and strategic action. I was so grateful to not be alone in my anger! I had spent over two years on this team, slowly and painstakingly building relationships and trust, sharing myself and learning about each of my colleagues as individuals. So I felt like I really earned the support I received from them and offered to them during this particularly challenging incident.

The woman who selected that video lesson was barely held accountable because, well, she just Didn’t Know! And her boss Didn’t Realize! She expressed embarrassment but not responsibility. When her boss first heard that our team had objections about the video, she immediately offered to talk to me about it, assuming it was the queer person alone who had objected. But every person on my team had a visceral reaction to the video and found the ignorance at the top of the organization inexcusable. Either way, the folks responsible for selecting the video pleaded ignorance and were ashamed. But they didn’t take responsibility for educating themselves. They viewed it as a one-time occurrence, an embarrassing oversight, not as an indicator of a huge blind spot in their human awareness that only they could fill in for themselves through active self-education. Not to mention the fact that we were all professional educators!

Privilege means never having to really imagine or understand the differences and experiences of others. I used to theorize that being conservative was a result of a lack of imagination. I thought it came from not being able to imagine what it is like to be anyone but yourself. I thought conservatives wanted to maintain the status quo at all costs because of being unable to imagine anything better. But systems of oppression protect the privileged from more than just their imaginations. And this kind of conservatism is a default state, with the imagination being actively blocked from a richer understanding of human experience. “I just didn’t know” and “I never realized…” are not only excuses but also the very stuff of privilege itself. Heterosupremacism protects the privileged from the work of having to notice, from having to pay attention, from having to think, from having to know things. It protects them from being uncomfortable and from taking responsibility. And it also precludes them from experiencing empathy and connecting across differences.

Audre Lorde talks about this very phenomenon in her classic The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. The title is often quoted but the context is less often discussed. The short essay was originally a talk given at a feminist conference, where she was invited to be on a panel, the only panel where black and lesbian feminist perspectives were considered. Lorde courageously decided to take up this fact in her talk, and specifically to take on the conference organizers’ privileged response of Not Knowing Who To Ask and Not Realizing They Were Doing Anything Wrong. Instead of taking responsibility, the conference organizers relied on the very person they were excluding. They felt like their lack of knowledge was a neutral fact. But this studied lack of knowledge about difference is no accident; it is how exclusion and dehumanization work to perpetuate themselves. This combination of ignorance and irresponsibility in the face of difference is exactly the “master’s tool” that Lorde is referencing:

This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master's concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of Color to educate white women -- in the face of tremendous resistance -- as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought…

Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.

What I want is for us to take up some of the hardest problems in front of us. One of the reasons these problems are so hard is because no one wants to take them up! Sincerely taking them up will start to produce a change in us. People who dig into their discomfort and fear will be different from people who keep their blinders on and proceed as usual. It is a process that challenges us to persist through discomfort. Even before the evolution of ideas or opinions, the very act of taking up heterosupremacism will change us. And people don’t exactly fear change, but fear that change will produce loss with nothing tangible to be gained. People fear loss, and they are right, they will lose something. To start they will lose the fantasy of their sexuality being natural and normal and the fantasy of being morally righteous. Facing this loss will take courage.

Straight people who take up heterosupremacism will become other than what they are, because the process will change their self-concept. The hard problem for me is staying with them, sitting with the pain and not going into a rage and subsequently shutting down. The questions that came up for me there remain with me. Can I love straight people well enough to see them through their loss, even when I am feeling rejected as a consequence? Can I encourage them? To support them in accepting that they will no longer have access to self-affirming myths of human nature, or that the mythology might change entirely? I want them to see and be curious about our differences, and be curious about the implications of these differences. And I want us ALL to be more in touch with reality, more connected by understanding, and more comfortable with complexity. I am no longer in that workplace sitting side by side with straight people working through our differences, but the learning and patience I took away from the practice of sitting with heterosupremacism and building alliances was infinitely more valuable than my minimal severance payment.

Parental Archive

Standing.

Far right.

High Cholesterol

Overheard on my block tonight: "You act like a boy so I'm going to fight you like a boy."


Right now I am looking at this picture where I'm riding piggyback on a new friend. You can't see it in the picture but we are in front of maybe a hundred cheering queer people who are out in the park for a day of games, dress-up and socializing. We are on our way to collect a tiny prize for our field day team as part of a very promising evolutionary current in the local community ecosystem. Suddenly I'm thinking back to a certain day in high school. After school I was walking to my car and somebody threw a rock that hit me on the left hip and bounced off. It was about the size of a baseball, probably a chunk of broken concrete and gravel. That shit was everywhere where I grew up, paving a new parking lot or strip mall that would go unoccupied. Somebody threw a rock at my crotch. I never saw who threw it but I wonder where are they now? Sometimes I still think about all the people who convinced me to feel so alone and subhuman that I wanted to kill myself when I was little more than a kid. Now I have my share of problems but my life turned out all right. How did the conformity you so passionately enforced work out for you? I imagine your cholesterol is sky high and your wife left you and your house was foreclosed and you lost all your hair. I wonder if they do anything differently now in my old high school, if the teachers and children there have heard about Lawrence King or Sakia Gunn. I think about how fortunate I was to suffer only the most minor of forms of violence, the rocks, spit and insults. It would be great to one day feel more compassion for people in my past, but for the moment I just know I need to release all this rage I tried to swallow for so long.

Reminders from an Undated Work Journal

1. It's not about me.
2. Respect people's time.
3. Everything relates to goals and values. Details reflect priorities.
4. Don't act when you are triggered.
5. Get over how you think things should be and work with how things are.
6. People are mobilized by feelings and relationships.

Shit List Day 4: Family Values

Rather than go in to a critique of patriarchy, or the potential damage of bad families, I want to look at the idea of family as an exclusionary anti/social unit. Patriarchal families have been extremely bad for women and children, and that should always be named because it is infuriating and unacceptable. However right now I am primarily interested in having some conversations about how the family itself serves to obstruct a more supportive social system overall.

Families function to favor the set of people who are Blood Relations over the set of people who are Others. From the healthiest to the most oppressive, families all share a relationship to the question of who counts as family and who doesn’t. This way of dividing up the world has been completely exploited in the everyone-for-themselves capitalist system.  Economic oppression thrives in part on the idea that I don’t owe anything to anyone except my own flesh and blood. We can all do better. Queer people are here to do better. We are here to destroy family values.

When it comes to providing empathy and taking responsibility, our culture teaches us to prioritize family members over all the other humans to whom we are not related. Of course empathy and responsibility are not actually limited resources. But that is another conversation, because in our consumer culture we behave as though everything were a limited resource. So the idea of family enshrines care for a tiny set of people and diminishes responsibility for the rest. This fundamental aspect of family values is considered admirable because it is usually described as a form of loyalty.

The underside of family loyalty is a social order that lacks care for many, many, many, many people who need it. The system is set up to create a no-win situation where struggling families are simply not up to the multitude of challenges facing them, including emotional, economic, health challenges. Then the state and the community get to evade responsibility by pointing to some imagined moral failing of those same families.

In my birth family, two of the four of us were periodically hospitalized for mental illnesses and we certainly could have used some support from outside. But there we were, closed up in our suburban house, a family that offered little to its members and was unknown to others. We were not Family to anyone else. In other words, we were not in the set of cared-for people belonging to anyone capable of providing actual care.

So you say some families value empathy, healing, service, and caring for others? They are on their way to destroying family values and building new ones. Your family is a big household full of friends who chose to be together? Your family is tiny but made up of people who consider the babysitter a sister? You are building new family values. The old and the new live together side-by-side today, and sometimes you can feel the conflict happening. It doesn’t exactly help that we use the same word for both more open and more closed family systems. We all need a new normal. The default cannot remain the family that excludes. Right now many families straddle two worlds, waiting for the new to begin as the old passes away. We need to think carefully about what we wish to preserve from this contested territory.

On one hand, I want the new normal to question the ethics of valuing some people over others. The concept of family hinges on who is in and who is out. The conventional idea of family is based on the exclusion of the immoral, unwholesome other, in other words, the queer, the person who is with somebody the others do not approve of, the "illegitimate" child, etc. We have all had enough of that!

On the other hand, I want to note even the most loving family as currently constructed is still isolated and very often not up to all the work we expect from it. The family is inadequate to provide individuals with all the social, emotional and economic support that would make for healthier, flourishing human beings.

So the family is failing those it excludes, then under pressure it is failing those included as well. The family is failing, failing, failing. Can gay marriage be part of both the old and the new? It seems to me to hold too fast to the old. In the wrong hands, gay marriage serves to further de-legitimize our tribes and families of choice. NPR has provided some minimal coverage of conscientious objectors to gay marriage by inviting Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore on as a guest on at least 2 occasions. Recently there was coverage of the NY marriage decision, and the same interviewer who has spoken with Mattilda awkwardly brought up the fact that some gays think there is something “special” to preserve about gayness, separate and apart from marriage. A guy about to marry his long-time boyfriend responded, “Yes but we are tired of being second-class citizens.” Was he referring to the ability to marry, or is that what single people and unmarried lovers are? Or is that what people in relationships outside monogamy are? I found his response illuminating because it spoke on many levels regardless of whether the speaker would deny or confirm my reading. If anything, it is heterosupremacism that makes us second-class citizens, not the law in isolation and not the status of being unmarried. I wonder how single straight people felt hearing that interview.

The meaning of family may be contested but real families in the real world still kick out queer children and sometimes drive them to suicide. Real families still struggle and implode under pressures that are simply too great. We cannot rehabilitate that shit by simply demanding a place within it. Our presence alone will not do the trick. We need better values where care includes people who are neither your relatives nor connected to you by the rule of the state, and where a variety of relationships are respected. Before we jump to perpetuate a system that exists at our expense, we might consider whether we want to continue to even use the word “family.” But in the meantime, let’s preserve a practice well embedded in the queer community’s history and in our best present moments: caring for one another regardless of blood or law.

Shit List Day 3: Queers

I will be among the first to point out that the queer community has a million problems, flaws and failings. We fuck up regularly. We keep trying to love each other well, and sometimes we succeed in spectacular and very moving ways. Then sometimes we don’t try. Then some other times we exclude each other, accidentally or worse. Sometimes we behave like self-righteous douche bags, especially when we think we’re being “radical.” All too often we are as racist, classist, misogynist, transphobic and otherwise deluded as the larger culture we are trying to resist. Sometimes we replicate the very problems we try to address. Sometimes I need to manifest the presence of my finger up my butt just to deal with all the glittery elitism, cliquish condescension and premature enlightenment.

At the same time that I often feel alienated, I am also very proud of us. We have our love and we have our hope and best of all we have each other. I’m proud of our resilience and all we have survived. When I was a closeted kid, somebody told me that gays stick together because their families reject them. It gave me hope. And for gay marriage to divide my people into pairs when we have already created a more successful and more loving and more expansive social structure is positively frightening. Community doesn’t happen by accident but the mainstream default state of individual isolation requires very little effort. I fear the impact gay marriage will have on gay community. I fear that marriage might narrow the group of people we care for into a "family" at the expense of the expansive group of cared-for people we currently call our community.

My personal commitment to always actively build community has made my life more fulfilling than I ever dreamed it would be. I have experienced more love among queer people than I ever hoped to receive from a straight family structure, more than I ever saw around me in my straight upbringing, more than I imagined I would ever deserve or attain. I was brought up to believe as a dyke I would be doomed to unrequited love for straight women who could never possibly love me back. I was not going to marry so I would die alone. My life has already turned out much better than I had ever imagined, and certainly better than I had been raised to expect. The ongoing work of entering, understanding, sharing and repairing queer community has been and continues to be fundamental to sustaining my ability to exist in this world.

Gay marriage feels much too much like the compulsory heterosexuality I experienced growing up in the suburbs. At our best we have made markedly different, more just and more rewarding lives for ourselves. I want us to be able to stick with it and keep working on it. The fabric of the queer community is delicate and requires our care. If we throw it in the marriage washing machine and it disintegrates into couples, we’ll ruin something very precious, something that improves the world through its presence. Weakening the queer community would be a real loss for everyone who has ever wanted something more from their love relationships than what has been socially dictated. Hand wash only, please!