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. 

BUTCH Voices

The mission of BUTCH Voices is to enhance and sustain the well-being of all women, female-bodied, and trans-identified individuals who are masculine of center.  We achieve this by providing programs that build community, positive visibility and empower us to advocate for our whole selves inclusive of and beyond our gender identity and sexual orientation.

BUTCH Voices held a one-day regional conference here in NYC on September 25, 2010 and I made it for part of the day and was glad I did. With consideration to the masculine-of-center theme, this was one of the most successfully diverse queer conferences I have ever been to, particularly in terms of age and race. It was totally heartening to see young and old queers of various races coming together to talk about some deep concerns about our own survival, existence, well-being and flourishing. It was set up as a healing space, less about our gender and sexual politics and more about coming forward with the fullness of all we have learned... and acknowledging all of our injuries and really communing with others. Being seen and seeing other butches.

The climate of the conference was one of thoughtfulness, consideration and care. Clearly a lot of planning went into every little thing! From hosting the conference in a physical space that belongs to queer community advocacy groups to taking steps to make it affordable to the idea of a collective keynote. Even the home-made snacks that were on hand all contributed to a sense of welcome. I think it’s safe to say that feeling welcome is one of our community’s heavy trigger issues and has been the demise of other conferences. Not this one. The organizers made sure and the warmth was undeniable.

One of the workshops I attended was entitled Doing Relationships with Emotional Armor: For Stones and our Partners.  We sat in a circle and facilitator Corey Alexander led us through a bunch of increasingly challenging introspective exercises, including a list of common and all-too-familiar ways emotional armor can manifest. Here were people who wanted to walk the complicated and challenging line where we do not pathologize emotional hardness but we simultaneously recognize how this hardness, this armor, gets in the way of the intimacy we need. It was refreshing that the workshop was designed to respect where each of us was at, rather than move us someplace else. It was really about self awareness. Corey took some time to acknowledge how and why we create emotional hardness and distance in the first place. Dismantling my junky old personal armor has been a personal project of mine for a good 7 years or so, back from the time when it started to outlive its usefulness. It was good to remember the usefulness, to remember something cool about this thing I usually consider at best suffocating and more often soul crushing. It got there for a reason, now it's getting taken apart for a reason too.

A spontaneous group discussion was an exciting break with my prior experience of genderqueer spaces: Responsible Masculinity. This was not on the original program but the programmers wisely left space for people to create the conversations that mattered most to them, knowing some topics are always unforeseen. A few folks simply announced they were adding this topic. When the time came, we overflowed the room that had been reserved for spontaneous conversation. We moved to another open area, sat in a circle, and I counted 42 people who were eager to discuss misogyny, sexism and competition among masculine of center queers. I have been waiting a very very very very long time to sit in such a group and it felt so satisfying just to look at peoples’ faces. Some great insights were voiced about the damage caused by rigidity in our gender expectations of ourselves and others, and the perils of trying to enforce our own ideas of what butch is onto other butches.

A few folks in the Responsible Masculinity conversation got in to talking about their mistakes and it seemed very cathartic for them. At times I felt ill at ease with the comfort with which people expressed their previous misconceptions. There is a place for confessions, but I am not sure the conference was it. This was where the therapeutic atmosphere crossed a line for me, I didn’t actually want it to be a safe space for somebody to say they used to hate femmes or note how they used to believe femmes were not legitimately queerly gendered. Putting it in the past tense doesn’t make it less painful for others to hear about, and as cathartic as it might have felt to confess, I don’t want that stinky turd on my floor. Maybe the person who confessed that they used to hate femmes is reading this right now. Maybe they are thinking they were owning up to their mistakes, not just dumping them. Maybe it was a little bit of both. But if it was painful for me to hear I don’t imagine it was a high point of the conference for the femmes in the room. Community building is messy, messy work and you need to make room for mistakes. Sometimes we mirror the sexism we intend to take up. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like we can have a masculinity conversation without awkward and strained references to opening doors and picking up checks, either. Just got to make some more room, make some room for this messy work.

At the end of the discussion there were some deep conclusions about the need for mentoring in our community, the need to respect each other and not assess each other, and the impact that our all-too-frequent failure to love each other has on our own psyches. One of my favorite comments was that we need to recognize and greet each other, even on the street and subway, rather than looking away like we often do. The fact that this conversation happened at all was a breath of fresh air and I am grateful I had the opportunity to be a part of it.

But the best thing about BUTCH Voices was the incredible potential and palpable excitement in the air. The organizers actualized their vision of a safe, inclusive community where masculine types with divergent identities could feel welcome and give voice to the issues that matter to us, and this was hopefully just the first of these conferences to be held in NYC. What was most encouraging was the clarity of the feminist frame surrounding the day. We were there to support, encourage, affirm and heal. We all spend enough time fighting the good fight, it was really powerful to regroup and gather some energy.

Catherine Opie, Girlfriends

Gladstone Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of never before seen work by photographer Catherine Opie... “Girlfriends” combines brand new color photographs with a selection of black and white photographs from Opie’s archive that have never been printed. In this new series she explores the nature of butch-dyke identity through portraits including those of public figures such as k.d. lang and Eileen Myles as well as friends and partners who have appeared in her work throughout the years.

The photographs positioned directly across from the entrance are of Daniela Sea and Kate Moennig.  These actors are familiar from the L Word, so anyone coming in to the gallery to see lesbian representation is given an easy entry point in faces they recognize from TV.  In her photo, Daniela Sea presents as herself, not her character, maybe to remind the viewer we may be seeing actors but we are not looking at fiction.  My initial experience of this part of the gallery was an urge to hurry through, thinking to myself, I have looked at these faces enough, I don’t need to look at them here.  But I wonder how more straight-leaning art world visitors felt about these two.  I wonder if Daniela Sea and Kate Moennig served as sentinels of the portal into Cathy Opie’s particular variety of queer representation.  Maybe for some visitors, these two faces provided a gentle welcome and permission to stare at the butches in the gallery.  For me, I pretty much hurried past them to get to the good stuff.

Getting stared at/glared at/looked over/given the hairy eyeball is something of a foundational experience of being butch.  And yet, so is invisibility.  Here in the gallery we are allowed the pleasure of staring at butches, evening staring long enough to be considered rude or inappropriate.  Further for some is the pleasure of both looking and being seen.  The contradiction of dirty looks and invisibility is stirred up here.  But there is more at play than technically excellent photography and queer representation. As the gallery grew more and more crowded on opening night, the room with filled butches looking at butches looking at pictures of butches, like a hall of mirrors or an alternate universe.

The combination of new and old photographs show the same people younger and older, showing the viewer something rather personal of the subjects. In our lives, the people we are close to age along side us, and when Cathy Opie shows us the same subjects over the course of years, we feel a connection to the subjects.  Maybe we feel the kind of connection we do to friends and family.  It gives the show a kind of intimacy and familiarity.  I have never met Pig Pen.  I watched Pig Pen in Hallelujah, a documentary about Ron Athey, I had seen Cathy Opie’s pictures of Pig Pen at the Guggenheim.  The stunning photo of Pig Pen at the center of the gallery stopped me in my tracks.  I felt simultaneously like I was seeing this person for the first time and like I was seeing an old friend... whom I’ve never met. Opie’s portraits often show queers as royalty surrounded by bold colors, but this one shows a saint with slightly bowed head and glowing backlight. (Image below, with my snapshot from opening night.  Notice the little bit of space gallery goers give this portrait, maybe a little subconscious reverence, maybe just a gap in the crowd.)

Many of the pictures feature butch people in wide-open spaces, outdoors, with a visible horizon.  A vertical person within a horizontally infinite space.  Butch standing by the ocean, in the woods, or mountains.  The spaciousness is so vast that much of what is pictured is sky reaching back out of site, woods filling the entire frame, a road trailing off into the horizon, the ocean trailing off to meet the sky.  The subject is at home in the frame, and it gives the impression they could move limitlessly in any direction.  There is this sense of freedom to being the only person in the frame, existing only in relationship to oneself, able to go near and far or anywhere in this wide-open space.

There is a room of all black and white pictures where the point of reference is Robert Mapplethorpe.  I can’t really remember exactly how I first heard about Robert Mapplethorpe, but I have loved him since high school.  The idea of revealing such classical beauty in expressions of sexual perversion was as exciting to me then as it is now. No one could deny that his photography was captivating and beautiful, but of course there was always controversy attached to his work.  A friend with a more liberal mom had the book Mapplethorpe, published in 1992, a year before my graduation from high school.  The book is enormous and heavy in more ways than one, and I studied it in a celibate teenage stupor until it became synonymous with queerness in my mind.  So the black and white room added yet another familiar touch point in the gallery for me.  (See the images below, Mapplethorpe's Self Portrait 1978, followed by my snapshot of one of Opie's self portraits from the black and white room.  Love the whips!)

The first time I saw photography by Cathy Opie was at the Whitney Biennial in 1995.  I was visiting the museum with my college aesthetics class, professor included, and had no idea about what we were going to see.  There was the now-classic self-portrait where she is wearing an S/M hood and has the word “pervert” freshly cut into her chest, still bloody.  Her shoulders and arms are crowded with needles piercing her skin.  There was also a picture of Ron Athey in thigh-high boots, and I recognized him immediately from his interview in Details magazine, also in 1995.  I studied that interview and still have the magazine where he talked about sexuality, pain and transcendence.  (It would be another ten years before I was fortunate enough to attend one of his performances, see image below, a treasured digital keepsake of mine!)  This interview and Opie’s photographs provided me with a window into the world I knew I needed to move into and set up my permanent residence.

When I went to see Catherine Opie: American Photographer at the Guggenheim in 2008, there were some self-portraits displayed together: The infamous Pervert picture. Another one where she is nursing, with the word "pervert" visible as a well-healed yet perfectly legible white scar.  (Admittedly difficult to see in the digital image below, but very clear in person.)  In a third photo she has her back to the camera to show a fresh cutting, similar to a child’s drawing of a family with the house and the parents and the sun shining, only both parents are drawn with skirts.  Reviewers seemed to think the proximity of these pictures represented some sort of progression, but I think it does quite the opposite.  The desire for family is present in the bloody cutting, and the perversion is visible in the image of motherhood. Here, I thought, is a vast and expansive observation about being a lesbian.  There is no contradiction, no before-and-after.  Our lives include all this and more.

I have never met Cathy Opie.  I attended a talk she gave at the NYC homo center during her show at the Guggenheim, and I saw her talking with friends at the Girlfriends opening.  It is curious that someone I do not know personally could evoke such a powerful sense of familiarity and inclusion.  I imagine that speaks to the experience of being part of a queer community that at its best shares more than individual relationships.   

School, Part 3

In middle school, I was very conflicted between wanting to fit in and wanting to be myself.  I just wanted to wear military surplus clothes all the time but I feared the consequences of emphasizing my masculinity.  I was already butch enough that I could not get through a single school day without my gender being commented upon by someone.  I developed a crush on an older girl.  She had short hair, wore camouflage pants to school and still managed to have friends.  I didn’t see how it was possible.

At my mother’s insistence, I attended weekly religious classes at a Lutheran church.  The class was a miserable collection of pre-teens, every last one of us enduring the drudgery because of our parents.  I doubt there was a single kid in that class who actually believed in god.  At the end of a year of old testament education, one of the this boys in the class asked me with sincere curiosity, “So why did your parents give you a girl’s name?”  Sometimes I tried to make light of these situations.  And every time something like this happened, I wondered: Why is it that when somebody gets your gender wrong they are never the ones who look stupid? 

What I learned in middle school were rules and taboos.  There are rules for being a man and there are rules for being a woman.  And then there is this big fat taboo against ambiguity.  I understood that my gender issue was unspeakable because the pronoun accidents and misunderstandings were never addressed directly.   In a 7^th grade math class, a substitute teacher asked me, “Are you in the right seat?  A girl is supposed to be sitting there.” She was not apologetic, she simply moved on.  I was the one in the wrong, even though she had just broadcast to the class that she thought I was a misbehaving boy who had stolen the seat of some good girl.  Laughter ensued, and if I had my way, I would have smote her on the spot.  Instead, I grew out my hair.

These experiences solidified my belief that while I did not belong among regular people, I also did not want to belong among them.  In response to my gender, people proved to be incapable of permitting the slightest deviance from stereotypical gender roles.  Each time they opened their mouths to me, I could see their frustration and inability to understand who or what I was.  It made them angry and impatient.  I did not have these words at the time, but I knew I was failing their expectations and frustrating them.  I also knew there were only two gender options and somehow I was ill suited to both.  On top of that I observed how deviating from gender roles produces disgust in others, real physical revulsion.  It was inconceivable to the adult denizens of my childhood that I could be a butch girl, so instead they looked at me and saw either a boy, or a disgusting girl, or an immature tomboy who needed to grow up already. That was a lot for a kid to deal with, so looking back now I understand how I spent a few years being fairly well shut down and distant from everything.

A friend’s mother literally asked, “Couldn’t she try to be more feminine?” I alternated between sharing their disgust with myself and being filled with rage at the confinement.  Folks proved themselves to be severely limited in their imagination and limited in their ability to see gender rules as just rules.  All I could see were rules, rules I could not keep.  Seeing gender as a set of made-up rules was one of the pivotal understandings in my life thus far because it shone a bright light on all the other norms that are taken for granted in our culture.  And it wasn’t just that others pressured me to obey the rules, it was that no one else seemed to understand that the rules were rules.  I imagine they thought, “This is just the way things are and always have been and always will be.  Girls don’t act/look/think/talk/dress/walk/behave that way.”  Sometimes the messages were direct and sometimes they were subtle.  Yet there was such universal agreement to these rules that usually no one even bothered to write them down.  So it wasn’t just that I was disobedient of gender rules, it was that I didn’t make any sense.  Men are like this, women are like that, anything else does not compute.  Anything else evokes disgust.  Becoming queer was not a matter of declaring my attraction to women, but more a permanent disengagement from following a given gender track, the simplifications, the either/or choices, the rules.  It felt liberating to realize this, but it also felt disconcerting and alienating.  But once that light came on, liberating, disconcerting or come what may, there was no turning back.   And I could not help but see that when the rule keepers weren’t criticizing me, they were busy attempting to control the bodies and sexuality of other girls with a similar set of rules about who is a whore, who is a slut, no abortions allowed, who is too fat, etc.

Later on in high school, we periodically held pep rallies to celebrate our treasured sports teams.  At the last pep rally I attended, this boy spit on me from the bleachers above where I was sitting by myself.  I do not remember if any words passed between us.  I only remember realizing there was spit in my hair, the long hair I had been growing since eighth grade in order to stop being mistaken for a boy, in order to minimize my surface differences from other girls.  When I think about simply walking out of the school building at the start of each subsequent pep rally, I feel these quiet exits capture the essence of my high school experience.

My senior year, I was awarded a scholarship based on my standardized test scores.  The corporate sponsor of the scholarship was the company where my father worked.  There was a dinner to be held at a nice restaurant with the principal of my high school, my parents, and some people from my father’s office.  Ordinarily, my parents barely noticed or commented on my clothes.  My mom had taken me dress shopping a few times because I had to dress up for orchestra concerts.  I hated having to wear a dress and always wore what ever I wanted outside of my time with the viola.  When we were getting ready to leave for this scholarship dinner and I came out in a black blazer I had bought for myself in the men’s department at macy’s.  I thought I looked OK.  My father insisted that I wear a dress and he was so mean and angry about it that I don’t even think I objected.  I very well may have, because we argued all the time back then, but what stands out most in my memory is the clarity of his contempt.  He was disgusted by me and ashamed for his colleagues to see me.  Now I understand that this was his problem and not mine. But at the time I absorbed it and felt disgusted and ashamed of myself too.  I wore the dress.  I barely spoke at dinner.  Instead of refusing the shame, I had made it my own and believed that I deserved it. 

Recently I told this story about my father for the first time, over dinner with a married friend and sometimes mentor.  He was asking me why I do not want to marry my girlfriend and I was attempting to talk about my coming out process with the gender police and the confinements of normalcy.  I described how walking away from traditional family values was a commitment to myself to make the best life I could imagine.  But another detail slipped out in the telling, which I had not previously articulated to myself or anyone else:  Growing up, I never really knew for sure if I was going to make it.  It was interesting to me that this came out spontaneously in the conversation, because I have consciously been working on ways of talking my past and simply telling the personal stories I haven’t told before.  It came out of my mouth as an additional detail, an unsightly little mess that plopped onto the dinner table.  I felt like part of me left the table for a few minutes to observe what would happen next.  I had admitted to uncertainty about the prospects of my living to adulthood. 

One of the reasons for my uncertainty was a lack of options I could live with.  Living a regular life, with a regular relationship and a regular gender was unattainable, repressive and ultimately undesirable.  So I never sought to broaden or revise regular to include me.  I never wanted to redefine normal.  I just wanted more options.  Now I know queers need to live in this world, not in an imaginary perfect world.  People need to live in this world without their bodies and genders and relationships being questioned and scrutinized and criticized and examined constantly.  Or even debated...  It feels like shit to have the substance of your reality subject to debate.  Queers need rights and protections under the laws we have now, not just the laws we imagine in a revolutionized future.  And yet to this day there remains no clearer or more persistent theme in my life than the need for more options.   

School, Part 2

Suzanne was one of the pre-teen smokers, not one of the popular girls.  She was a year older than me and constantly harassed and insulted me because of my queer boyishness, which was in her eyes just plain grossness.  I remember trying to ignore her, a failed strategy if there ever was one.  Finally came a day when she attacked me physically as well as verbally.  She came at me, not realizing that I kept the school library’s only judo book out for months at a time. When she put all her weight into shoving me, I grabbed her wrists, pulled hard and stepped aside.  She flew into one of the little bushes that lined the sidewalk leading up to the school entrance. 

Suzanne left me alone for a while after that, and then she went on to middle school a year ahead of me.  When I reached middle school, she resumed her usual insults and flinging of rubber bands from her braces at me on the school bus.  The school bus was always the site of the worst misery.  It was also where Suzanne applied her make up in the morning since I imagine her mom would not let her leave the house with as much eyeliner as she wanted to wear.  Does it ever suck to be an adolescent girl.

When I first arrived in middle school, there was no question in the mind of the average observer that I was a boy.  In my mind I was neither masculine nor feminine, but everyone else consistently read me as masculine.  I passed all the time, much to my chagrin, considering the resulting bullying, scorn, disapproval, ostracism and depression.  Around 1987, it got back to me that one of my classmates asked, “Who will want to marry a girl who looks like a boy?”  I barely knew what a lesbian was but people asked me if I was one.  I denied it, of course. I liked both girls and boys, but not too much considering that they were universally such a bunch of assholes. 

This was an enormously painful and lonely time. At recess one day, some one shoved me from behind.  I started to turn towards them, but then I got shoved much harder and knocked heads with this kid Jesse.  I got this strange greenish bruise on my cheek the next day, and it actually took me a while to figure out where it came from.  I must have been so shut down that the event did not immediately register.  Days later, I learned that the girl who pushed me was angry because she told her friend that she thought I was cute.  She was subsequently humiliated upon learning I was a girl.  I had been the object of a crush and revealed as a deceiver all without my knowledge or involvement.

I never talked to anyone about that experience until I was an adult.  It is very telling that I was so ashamed and never spoke of it, not to a parent, not to a teacher, not to anyone.  I thought somehow it was my fault.  My appearance had caused a series of tiny dramas: first attraction, followed by deception, then humiliation and finally revenge.  But my part in this soap opera only came in at the very end, for the revenge.  Too bad I could not understand at the time that none of this was about me, it was about the confusion, fear and anger (and a little bit of desire) other people experienced at the site of an adolescent butch girl.

School

The first thing I learned in elementary school was that I was different, and not in a good way. Adults and other children regularly attempted to correct my gender. The way I looked, dressed, talked and even walked were constantly being subject to scrutiny and comment.  Every day I was given direct feedback about the specific ways that I was failing to be a girl.  A steady stream of negativity came in the form of verbal correction, looking at me too much or not looking at me at all.  I was struck by the barely concealed disgust that my body, my clothes, my mannerisms, my interests and my whole self evoked in adults and children alike.  I got the message that I was distasteful, and I understood that I should be ashamed of myself.  And I was ashamed.

But at the same time I simply could not live with the idea of becoming more feminine.  My efforts were lackluster at best.  I would not have even known where to start.  What they wanted me to become was entirely alien to me.  I could try to be a normal girl and fail, or I could try to have some kind of integrity and be true to the self I felt I was.  So I made a commitment to gender nonconformity as a very young child, long before I had any concept of sexuality or desire.  No one called me a Lesbian until I reached middle school but every day I heard about how I was not a Real Girl.  My mother had put me in a dress for school pictures, and I heard about it a year later when one of my classmates recounted the only time she had ever seen me in a dress.  She detailed the color and material and everything about the dress I had worn the previous school year, while I was somewhat stunned because I could not recall what she had worn the previous day.  Even in a case where I was not being corrected, the scrutiny made me want to disappear.

Deep down I didn’t really want to be a girl, at least not in the way I saw all around me. I decided just to be smart instead.  Smart was an identity I could live with, although it certainly did not win any points with other kids.  With each new shitty experience, I became more determined to find my own way.  Being smart was a clear decision for me, rather than some innate quality.  I just had to concentrate and be willing to work hard, so I set my mind to do it. I pushed myself more than any teacher ever did.  Being smart was a way for me to get positive feedback from adults and a way to live with myself being different.  But mostly it provided a reason for me to continue to show up at school.

I rejected what others girls did and wanted, from dolls to dresses, from marriage to children.  Long before I had any concept of sexuality, I swore that I would never get married and never have children.  I knew this years and years before I knew I was queer.  I also started to formulate ideas about how if all the adults in my world were wrong about gender, they very well could be wrong about a whole host of other things too.  Even as a little kid, I could tell that a lot of the adult world was forced, in the same way gender was being forced on me.  I started to become suspicious about institutions like God, racism, sports, the mall, the giant TVs and the fenced-in homes, and every other suburban idea and aspiration.  My earliest desires included a desire to escape, get out of there and get away.

But there was more to my childhood masculinity than just failing to be a girl, more to it than wanting to be my own self.  There was also misogyny. Misogyny complicates this story by tainting my freewheeling nonconformity with a real aversion to all things related to being a woman.  It spoils the fun of this tomboy liberation narrative with a sexist distaste for the feminine. Sexism and boyish freedom mixed together in my young mind, and in the culture I saw how being smart was associated with being masculine.  It would be a long time before I could sort them out, but as a kid, I knew with certainty which side of the equation I wanted to be on.  I was ashamed that I had been born female but determined to never be a typical, normal woman.  This typical woman did not exist of course, but was the product of hateful statements my father made about helpless, ditzy women and admiring statements my mother made about men and what ever they said or did.  Well, my parents were simply acting in accordance with the sexism that was polluting the air, floating in the drinking water and blaring from the TV.  Within my childhood self existed a complicated mess of shamefully wishing I could be more of a girl, defying suburban girl conformity, and a creeping belief that women were inferior and irrelevant anyway. 

So this is only partially a story about me against the school, or the suburbs, or the world.  The truth is that I still do not fully understand how I made it through school.  I do not remember any moments of respite where I really believed that one day it would be OK for me to not be a regular girl.  Mostly I remember not being able to stand the expectations of me to be a girl, not being about to stand the disapproval of me not being a girl, and generally not being able to stand the scrutiny.  Instead of a story about how I courageously defied expectations and triumphed over the evil forces of suburban conformity, the truth is a much less flattering story about how regular old sexism cannot be extracted from my earliest rebellion against gender.  I was a nerdy tomboy who thought all girlish things were stupid, and that was the best I could do.