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. 

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.

On Being Both Queer and Human at the Same Time

Heterosupremacism blocks queers from being a part of the culture’s stories about what is normal, human, decent or good. Our likenesses, our histories, our kinship networks, are all missing from what is considered normal. Now people may object, “Oh what is normal anyway?” It’s nice when folks want to play at defying norms, but Normal is serious business. Normal that gets discussed is one thing, but Normal that gets enforced with silence and absence is another. This Normal is something queers have to contend with in our every interaction. In part it determines whether we will or will not be relatable. If you can’t talk to me about guy stuff and I’m not one of the girls, can you talk to me at all? This question sounds kind of funny but has been part of my real experience, particularly in professional settings. I have had to seriously consider my relate-ability as an organizer and a leader in straight education sector workplaces. I have discussed it with bosses and mentors, and I am grateful that more recently I have had the chance to experience it out in the open, instead of always just missing connections and feeling like an outsider for no clear reason.

Heterosupremacism is perpetuated by actively excluding that which is queer from our consciousness. What we think about, what occurs to us off the top of our heads is not the product of chance, but rather the result of a steady stream of stories presented to us over and over again. These stories make up our culture and are ingrained in our consciousness. The stories will not get questioned or rewritten without an active effort on the part of straight people to stop and look at what they have been trained to ignore, to seek to understand that which they have been trained is incomprehensible, and to make friends with those they have been trained to see as exceptional, abnormal, immoral, other. Heterosupremacism is the system that protects straight people from feeling responsible. Power acts to reproduce itself, and heterosupremacism is a self-serving feedback loop: Here is what is normal, so ignore this, that and definitely the other thing. Here is what is Normal, here it is again, and again. Something queer just showed up? That’s an exception and you can safely disregard it. Heterosupremacism keeps the queer as exceptional and either irrelevant or evil or both.

It is somewhat less common today for people to publicly spell out their homophobia but they still do sometimes like NY gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino saying "And I don't want them [children] to be brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid or successful option. It isn't." This is an open statement of heterosupremacism in that it literally negates the validity of our existence. Paladino also said "I just think my children and your children would be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising a family." He is speaking directly to his perceived moral superiority. The statement is literally asserting the fact of being better, he uses the slightly milder words “better off” and “much more successful.”

When I hear stuff like this I have several simultaneous reactions. I am hurt and angered. And I am also relieved. There is some part of me that is relieved when I hear some fucked up homophobia because I feel like I’m picking up on it all the time subliminally but it is never stated outright. Hearing it outright makes me feel relieved that I am not crazy. So when I see the full face of hatred, I am hurt but I also have a sick sense of relief that all the homophobia I have been sensing beneath the surface is finally out in the open.

Josh Vlasto from the opponent Cuomo campaign said Paladino's comments demonstrate “a stunning homophobia and a glaring disregard for basic equality." Democrats pointing at somebody like Carl Paladino and calling him homophobic are not actually condemning him, they are merely naming that he is homophobic. But wait, they didn’t actually do that. They said his remarks demonstrated homophobia. That is an even weaker statement than I initially thought. They weren’t even courageous enough to attach homophobia to the person, but rather more safely to his remarks.

Democrats act as though calling out Paladino’s homophobia makes them our allies, but it doesn’t. This incident brought to my mind the reality that democrats naming homophobia still may not be clear on the meaning of that word. It came across to me as though they were calling him a name, calling him Bad, but not making any statement of their own against homophobia, not actually making any positive action to ally themselves with queers. What a great deal-- they got to state their liberal version of moral superiority without taking any actual action against homophobia.

When Tracy Morgan expressed some unfortunately standard homophobic ideas in his stand-up comedy routine, responses were similar in that they focused on the words and not the intention. The words were condemned but not the heterosupremacism. This is a subtle but important difference. Morgan said, “I want to apologize to my fans and the gay & lesbian community for my choice of words at my recent stand-up act in Nashville.” I am not so concerned about his words, but more the thought and character of somebody whose words included the idea that being gay is something you learn from the media, and that he would kill his own son if he turned out gay, lesbians aren’t real, and kids who are bullied should stop complaining and stand up for themselves. Tina Fea, producer of the TV show he is on, said “I'm glad to hear that Tracy apologized for his comments.” Again emphasizing the comments as though this were a matter of poor word choice. NBC made reference to “homophobic remarks.” All the discussion is focused on the words because of fear of taking up their meaning. Heterosupremacism wins when straight people agree on what can and cannot be said, without changing any underlying beliefs, attitudes or assumptions.

Of course what Morgan actually said is very telling. Like with Paladino, it is a case of heterosupremacism being spoken out loud. When Morgan denied that lesbians are real, it reminded me of a straight colleague who explained away middle school girls coming out by making reference to the immaturity of boys their age. People honestly believe that lesbians aren’t real, and I had to have a conversation with my colleague about how lesbianism is not about boys at all, and is really real all on its own. Paladino said queerness was brainwashing, and Morgan blamed the media. When our realness and very existence is questioned, the normality of heterosupremacism is maintained at our expense. When Morgan said he would stab his own son if he turned out gay, I thought about a middle school boy who came out to one of the principals I used to work with. The kid’s father came in for a meeting and told the principal that no son of his was going to be gay because, “What would my boys think if they found out?” People hate the idea of having a queer kid, feel implicated and humiliated by it. This is not an accident of word choice.

The media has taken an interest in representing bullying as the source of queer kid’s suicides. We all know, if we pause to think, that many people are bullied and do not kill themselves. Many people who experience bullying are able to believe the bullies are wrong about them, or are able to focus on other more pleasant aspects of their lives, or are able to muster the courage to stand against the bullies. The root of “courage” is “cour” or heart. Encourage means to give heart to others. Bullying and the absence of encouragement are a dangerous combination, but even this analysis is just scratching the surface. In my personal experience, the masculinity I was being bullied for also made my parents uncomfortable around me and was the very same thing that adults and strangers regularly shamed and shunned me for. The message was so consistent that I mostly wound up believing the bullies were right about me. A much more recent example is a kid I heard about in one of the elementary schools I used to work with, whose teacher made fun of him for being too feminine. The kid himself told the principal it was like some of the bricks had been falling on him but suddenly all the bricks were falling on him.

Courage has to come from somewhere, and children have access to far fewer heart resources than adults. The fact that there are so few sources of encouragement for very young queers is something the media has missed in their interest in bullies. And of course they missed it, because they are implicated. The media has also failed to look at parents, teachers, witnesses, etc. The media has failed to look at its own portrayal of queers as wealthy, white and heteronormative. They continuously fail to actually “investigate” the fact that we are all complicit in queer children’s suicides. If the audience of the rather popular show South Park can watch an episode where queer kids in a christian conversion camp are killing themselves left and right, surely it doesn’t take crack investigative journalism to see the causal connection between the pressures of societal homophobia and suicide. The reason they stop at the surface isn’t because they lack the ability to see further. We do not want to see any further because investigation will lead to feeling responsible for the despicable immorality of heterosupremacism. It might destroy our self-image as a moral society. Our shared responsibility is exactly what we are unwilling to face.

The heterosupremacist mainstream media minimally represent us by showing those of us who are relatively less threatening to the status quo, and we’re supposed to be grateful for this inclusion. Acknowledging all the identities and relationships that are outside heterosupremacism would shed light on the fact that there isn’t anything morally superior about straight people or their relationships, nor are they any more natural. The ideal of heterosexuality and monogamous pairing is maintained by the systematic exclusion of all other varieties of sexual behaviors and intimate relationships. The assertion of our rights and the assertion of our existence overlap in this case. Asserting that people who are very much like heterosexuals deserve rights is very different from asserting that people who are very different from heterosexuals exist, are real, and also have rights.

If queers were represented more accurately in the media, or in entertainment, or sports, or politics, we might have an in-road into participating in the culture as ourselves. We would benefit from this participation by being seen and acknowledged for our differences, not forced through the filter of our similarities. Let’s give straight people enough credit to know they can understand our differences rather than dismiss them. I would love to see this conversation approached with curiosity. We’re not all the same deep down. But it’s going to be OK anyway. I’m proud of our differences and would like sometimes to see them acknowledged outside my immediate subculture. If our participation as ourselves in the larger culture is impossible, if our representation is impossible, then we do not get seen or acknowledged. We are not allowed to be real. And where you see the word “real,” read “human.” I want everyone and especially queer children to see that queer life is possible and it is real and it is a pleasure.

Judith Butler wrote something about this from the lens of how our identities are socially mediated. In Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy, she says:

…when we struggle for rights, we are not simply struggling for rights to attach to my person, but we are struggling to be conceived as persons. And there is a difference between the former and the latter. If we are struggling for rights that attach, or should attach, to my personhood, then we assume that personhood as already constituted. But if we are struggling not only to be conceived as persons, but to create a social transformation of the very meaning of personhood, then the assertion of rights becomes a way of intervening into the social and political process by which the human is articulated.

The challenge is not how to integrate queer people into the existing straight society, the challenge is the dissolution of straight society and heterosupremacist ideas of what qualifies as human.  When we are actually included, by definition, it will no longer be a straight society.  Attempts to integrate us without making anything other than linguistic changes to current laws, without changing anything other than spousal pronouns, will not only fail the vast majority of queers but will also do a disservice to all straight people in the continued limitation of their own options and world view, their own gender expression and relationships with each other. A heterosupremacist society cannot integrate us and remain heterosupremacist. It can’t simply adjust its choice of words and smooth things over. The culture cannot both have us in it and remain unchanged. 

Justin Bond and the House of Whimsy: Re:Galli Blonde (A Sissy Fix)

The historical imagination of a myth of how queer people were cast out, became cursed, for helping a goddess of light escape from the subjugation of her grieving sister. Cursed to be strangers in our own families, etc. We were watching the re-enactment of our downfall without even realizing it... until it happened. Totally fucking brilliant.

Loved the ritual of sugar and spice, and snakes and puppy dog tails. And Barbie’s head.
Loved the ritual of the disco, the invocation of the houses of NYC, the re-imagined vogue.
Loved Pearl Lin’s sword dance.
Loved the skeleton castration scene.
Loved the kiddie pool communion ritual preceded by the sexiest dance ever.
Loved the dancing, set, music and costumes.

At the end of the mythological re-enactment was a healing ceremony where our pains were confessed and we were healed... it made me want to run up to the stage and get healed too! The people being healed were the actors in the play but their confessions of pain freed them from character as they described their personal experiences of discrimination, rejection, shunning and violence. I wanted Justin Bond to heal me. I wanted to confess how the spectre of the predatory lesbian has always kept me from touching and complimenting women, from expressing any form of admiration or from speaking any depth of love. It blocks me from acting on my desires. It chokes down the least impulse of tenderness and it keeps my hands strictly to myself. I fight back every chance I get. Sometimes I even win. It gets larger, it gets smaller, but it never goes away.

The confessional ritual contained a repeated litany of femme-phobia, homophobia, trans-phobia. Why not name misogyny? Or sexism? In the simplest of terms, part of the reason it is so bad to be a feminine man or trans woman or anywhere on the feminine spectrum is because it is bad to be a woman, period, and a person called male at birth who behaves in a way that is associated with women, well, that's demeaning. Patriarchy was named by one of the confessors, and patriarchy is a big daddy of the -isms that were named. A body with many heads. But I am still stumped over the absence of the word "sexism." Hatred of femininity is misogyny, so coining a new word here seems too small and a failure to make an easy connection.

Is it too much to expect queers to connect the dots between the hatred of effeminacy and the hatred of women? And if it is, isn’t that a problem for our movement? Feminism shouldn’t be news to queer people, and actually I imagine that everyone in the show would agree. The show was an awesome, gender-bending, beautiful blessing and really tapped the vein of all the is magical in our community, our movement, our history and our identity. The failure to articulate the link between women’s oppression and gay oppression created a conspicuous absence in an otherwise awesome work of art.

Generations

Generations. 2010. Barbara Hammer & Gina Carducci. Inspired by Shirley Clarke’s film Bridges Go Round (1953), Hammer and Carducci use two Bolex cameras to capture the final days of Coney Island’s Astroland amusement park. Generations is playing at MIX 23 NY Queer Experimental Film Festival on November 12, 7 PM

The first time I met Barbara Hammer was at CUNY’s 2009-2010 Kessler Lecture. Sarah Schulman was delivering a talk as the recipient of the Kessler award for making a substantial contribution to the field of queer studies. I was attending by myself, and apparently so was Barbara. When she came in, I recognized her and smiled, so she came over and sat with me despite the fact we had never met. The lecture was fabulous, a mind-blowing break from conventional thinking about homophobia that was disorienting in its radical reframing of the meaning of queer community.

The first time I met Gina Carducci was a few years earlier on March 21, 2007 at the Nobody Passes book launch event at Bluestockings, a feminist lefty book store/info shop in the Lower East Side. I was reading an excerpt from “The End of Genderqueer,” something I wrote about the tension between social and revolutionary purposes in identity poltics and queer community building. The reading was my big atheist religious moment, to stand and read in the same very same place where so many of my personal heroes have stood and read. Though I’ve been told no one could tell, my knees were shaking so hard I feared I might fall over. I met Kate Bornstein after the Q&A, and got to tell her how profoundly her writing had affected me. Later that night I met Gina through the good graces of Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore.

A film maker looks at a film maker looking through a camera at a spectator/subject...

Generations is a film about making a film.  Two queer film makers collaborate to create an experimental film that shows the process of them shooting and working with the film itself.  We see each filmmaker with her Bolex, and we see the equipment used in developing and printing. We see them filming each other on the subway, at Coney Island, and in the film lab; some images are beautifully saturated with color and manipulated into abstraction, some are relatively straightforward and contemplative. But images are only the beginning of the elaborate parallel meanings and connections in Generations.

When Barbara Hammer and Gina Carducci agreed to make a film together, they planned for a highly structured creative process. They decided on Astro Land at Coney Island as their location and shot the footage together, each with her own 16mm camera. Each artist started with the complete footage but edited privately, neither seeing the other’s work until it was complete. The two complete works were joined into a single film, one after the other, and premiered at the MoMA Barbara Hammer retrospective.  Each of these facts about the process has a bearing on the final film and its meaning, as does the fact that Hammer’s retrospective opened with a screening that featured four films made in the spirit of learning and collaborating with other women. Hammer lives her feminism, so clearly that even her retrospective, traditionally a celebration of an individual artist, began by sharing the spotlight with other women.

Coney Island is in a beautiful state of disrepair that recalls its history as one of this country’s original sites of recreation when recreation was a new concept. Coney Island always seems to be in jeopardy of either destruction or renovation, either of which would signify an ending to what the place is and has been. Film itself is a medium that is used less and less. Both the subject matter and the medium speak to mortality, the passage of things we hold dear, their beauty is in jeopardy of being lost.

Barbara Hammer is the creator of over 80 films.  Her work has taught queer audiences about experimental film and experimental film audience about the politics of queer sexuality.  Not only have Hammer’s films captured lesbian feminism and culture from the 1970s to the present, in a very real way her films have contributed to the creation of that culture.  Gina Carducci is a radical queer filmmaker who hadn't made a film for five years when she met Barbara. Carducci works in a film lab but her own camera equipment was idly stored in various places at the time. Clearly this was not to be a collaboration of equals, but a mentor-student relationship. Mentoring is woefully absent in the queer community, perhaps because it is so perilous, perhaps because we have been too busy in the struggle to make its cultivation a priority. Mentoring between queer women needs to be handled carefully, since we sustain some wear and tear from constantly coming up against sexist and homophobic power dynamics. Our experiences with being excluded from power make it difficult for us to make the imbalance of a traditional mentor-student relationship work well. It is hard to receive guidance or worse yet, advice; it is also hard to take up our power and guide others without being stifled by self-doubt and second thoughts.

An innovative idea to undermine this traditional power dynamic was to shoot the film together and edit separately. This idea doesn’t make the teacher and student equal, nor does it seek to.  But it does undermine the possibility of Hammer exercising undue influence while also creating the opportunity for Carducci to get back into film making, get creative, and essentially go to town stylistically while knowing her work would be seen by an experimental film audience at MoMA. The rules of their process freed Carducci from the potential perception that being mentored by Hammer made her work derivative, while simultaneously allowing Hammer to mentor somebody less than half her age without overshadowing and thereby authentically pass along some of her wisdom. This working agreement was still to be a mentor-student relationship, but not fall prey to the inherent inequity in that dynamic. The collaborative process they came up with subverts the traditional mentor-student relationship without denying that it exists, but rather by taking it consciously and deliberately into account.

Carducci edited her film on a flatbed editor, a mechanical process involving literally cutting and splicing film. Hammer opted to scan the film then edit on a computer. Here the elder shows us the potential of the new, and the younger remains loyal to the structures and demands of the old. Each works with the footage alone, on her own terms, in her own style, and with her own priorities present. The individual pieces were joined together to form one continuous whole, with one showing after the other. It is difficult to see where one ends and the other begins. Gina told me up front that her film was first, but I’m pretty sure I would have been able to tell that from the formal structure of Gina’s work and the playful tone of Barbara’s. And with a nod to Bridges Go Round, the soundtrack is very different in each part of the film.

The early portion of the film has a visual pattern of numbers from the carousel and repeated safety instructions in the soundtrack. There is a level of abstraction that seduces the viewer into a fascination with details, with close shots of Barbara’s hands winding the Bolex or repetitive images of the old signs that linger around the changing Coney Island. In her portion of the film, Gina includes Barbara voicing the advice to shoot more from the “emotional body” and less from the “measuring mind,” and she begins and ends with images of Barbara.

The latter portion of the film exhibits some of my favorite elements of lesbian culture with footage of the two filmmakers beneath the boardwalk, each hiding behind columns trying to sneak footage of the other. There is simply no pretense of coolness. There is Barbara Hammer sticking two fingers up behind Gina’s head just to make some careless mischief. I admire her consistent lack of irony and utter refusal to be detached or distant from her subject matter. In fact, I had the pleasure of admiring her joyful presence in her films through out the screenings I attended at the MoMA retrospective. At one of the Q&A sessions Barbara mentioned that the editor pleasures herself in what she chooses to include in her film. In her half of the film, the editor is surely full of pleasure with her love of the beach, the camera, and Gina.

In the pleasure and admiration each film maker shows in her choice of images of the other, Generations touches on the radical potential of queer love.  On screen, the filmmakers present as artists at large in the world, but also in their own smaller world of queer friendship. In my imagination of our community, “queer friends” are the opposite of “just friends.” Queer friends are not necessarily lovers yet they retain all their love and sexuality in relationship to one another. In queer frendship there is a grounding recognition of all that we share. It is moving to see a queer friendship across ages documented here, especially at a time when the only queer relationships that seem to reach the public eye are those that aspire to heteronormativity.  (Generations comes chronologically on the heels of a particularly vile mainstream movie about wealthy white married lesbians and their sperm donor, from a lesbian director who is so deluded about the meaning of representation that she claims this portrayal is apolitical.)

And finally as the title suggests, Generations is about generating culture: how we make a culture for ourselves, how we create a legacy and how we express our values.  How do queer people pass along our culture when it is never along bloodlines? The film literally shows its own creation, the filming, the work in the lab, the friendship. The making of this film is a political action in that it is preserving queer culture, in particular, our fabulously different friendships. I totally enjoyed witnessing this difference, this homo/mentor/student/friend relationship full of creativity and love. It reminded me of how much I appreciate the precious utopian moments of interconnection in my own life, like back at that lecture and at the bookstore. The Hammer retrospective at MoMA was overflowing with such moments, with utopian imaginings and deep connections between art, community and the emotional body. Generations invites us to pause and actually feel the meaning of our relationships and legacies.

“Big Mom sat in her rocking chair, measuring time with her back and forth, back and forth, back and forth there on the Spokane Indian Reservation. She sang a protection song, so none of the Indians, not one, would forget who they are.”
-- Sherman Alexie, Reservation Blues

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.

Pleasure and Danger in Mt. Airy

In March of this year, the authors of Manifesta spoke at a Brooklyn Museum panel about feminism across generations.  The panel discussion was framed as a dialogue across feminist generations in celebration of the Sackler Center, the one-of-a-kind feminist art center at the museum which houses the Dinner Party.  I was pretty excited to go see them and pretty disappointed in how the panel actually turned out.  Lots of discussion of second wave this and third wave that. They talked about their second wave feminist mothers and repeatedly brought up the participation of their husbands in childcare.  The discussion failed to examine the family as the foundational site of patriarchy. The panel placed sexism and misogyny in accurate yet contextually remote places like sex trafficking, but not in contextually present places like their own marriages... marriage being the living and breathing building material of patriarchy. They talked a little bit about pornography but not at all about compulsory heterosexuality. 

Fast forward a few weeks to April, when I had the honor of bringing a program from MIX NYC to Philadelphia for our second round as guest curators for The Flickering Light.  After the bus and train, Mt. Airy positively glowed green, lush and luxurious with coffee shops and beautiful old houses and gardens.  Even before the film screening at the Art Garage in Mt Airy, I could sense a bad vibe from the audience, maybe a skepticism or lack of interest... something.  Feeling some coldness during the introduction, I probably should have intervened in the moment.  Made a joke or asked a question. How many of you are familiar with experimental film?  What brought you here tonight?  Curious about what you are about to see? Instead I did my usual introduction about what MIX does, our festival and various projects. I saw no one outwardly presenting as femme, at least not displaying any of the traditional markers...  And I got very little eye contact.  The few people with long hair seemed more on the all-natural side of things.  My rational voice scolded me not to assume anything.  After all, they must have come to the screening for a reason.  After all, the title of the screening instantly conveyed a lot of information about the content: Creepy Dirty Girlie.  After all, The Flickering Light is a warm, welcoming, independent, free-spirited, open minded art space.  And I made a point of making sure everyone got the program notes to contextualize what they were about to see: queer femininity.  And although I don't remember exactly what I said in the intro, I know the words "queer," "femme" and "sexuality" were high on the word count.

We had an audience of about 35, but by the second film people started walking out.  Six people walked about within the first 20 minutes of a screening that totaled less than 60 minutes worth of short films. There were some x-mas lights that remained lit during the screening, by necessity since in an emergency you need people to be able to find the exit.  The lights enabled me to see everyone's faces and literally averted eyes at the somewhat obscured penis in Project B*mbi, an experimental film that shows various strains of male domination over women, animals, and other men. A woman in front of me put her hand over her eyes at a brief moment of cock from Debbie Does Dallas, which Project B*mbi overlays with Bambi and The Deer Hunter. The film brilliantly invokes pornographic sexuality in order to reveal a discourse of domination. I love Project B*mbi, like I love all the films in this program...

More walk-outs followed the S/M images in 120 Secondi, and I am not sure if people even made it to the pussy close-ups in Pop or Hidden.  The walk-outs probably either missed or didn't enjoy the subversive humor in One Useless Prick, or in Sometimes You Fight for the World, Sometimes You Fight for Yourself, or in Golden Diamonds.  And they definitely missed the straight-up feminism in Hey F*ck Face and My Dead Brain.  While I do not take audience discomfort personally, I do wonder what the person sitting one row in front of me thought- I just introduced the films, mentioned I came all the way from NY to bring you this screening- and I am sitting right behind you.  She couldn't stick out a single short film she didn't like in order to see the program as a whole?  I suspect this was not a matter of like or dislike, but a matter of offense. In a queer film screening, femininity and even het porn images seemed like obvious feminist content to me.  But this audience showed me how easy it was to miss!  And reminded me about the lack of consensus among queer women about feminism.  The content offended them and I was offended they walked out.  Offense all around.

Creepy Dirty Girlie is a program of short films dealing in some way or other with queer feminine sexual expression.  Some more subtle than others, some serious, some comical.  The program went over well during its original screening at MIX22-The NY Queer Experimental Film Festival last fall, with an audience of approximately 85. Audience members even dressed up for the occasion.  At MIX, Creepy Dirty Girlie was thrilling.  Many of the film makers were in attendance.  The audience was energetic and sexy, with everyone celebrating visible queer femininity on the screen, in the audience, all around.  

But the Mt. Airy screening showed me a whole different angle, put me into another state of consciousness, shifted my vision and allowed me to see the films through different eyes. See there were no traditional plots in any of the films... and there weren't even any characters speaking dialogue! I hadn't even noticed the absence of these traditional movie elements before this particular screening.  I sat in the audience in Mt. Airy and realized we were showing queer women's sexuality with no narrative.  The work challenges the audience to make meaning.  I mean, it was clear to me when I was viewing these films and assembling the show for MIX that every last minute was critical of heteronormativity and showed the complicated, perilous relationship between women, femininity, sexism and sexual expression. Hence the title... but it was not clear at the time that the films pushed other boundaries too. 

As Abigail Ottoman recently noted, "Being femme is a constant, simultaneous evocation and rejection of heterosexuality."  Maybe our audience in Mt Airy only saw the evocation and missed the rejection part.  I thought these films in total were about being women, about our bodies, about what is expected of us.  But the audience members who left only saw the fucking.  At the end of the screening, a few audience members hung out for discussion but most hustled right out.  One woman stayed to discuss Lilith references with the excellent film makers behind My Dead Brain.  But we mostly missed out on any kind of dialogue, and that was probably the biggest loss of all.  In Barbara Hammer's memoir, Hammer! Making Movies out of Sex and Life, she discusses touring with her films and the heated discussions afterward about the explicit sexual content, and I was really inspired by this vision of an engaged feminist dyke community.  So I guess the lack of argument is what bothers me most, not the fact that people were offended.  I just wish they had stuck around to talk about it or something.  Didn't anyone want to give me a piece of their mind?

There is no excuse for walking out on sexuality explicit content when it was noted on the website and emails. During an impromptu processing session after the screening, the excellent and insightful founder of The Flicking Light discussed the fact that the event had been listed on two lesbian meet-up sites without any description.   And there is history in lesbian culture of sex-negative attitudes and beliefs, rooted in early second wave feminist critiques of the very real sexist foundations of conventional pornography.  A lot of queers I know pretty much shit on this part of our history, but we need to remember that this very criticism of pornography at least in part motivated a lot of the home made porn, radical porn and sex positive porn we enjoy today.  And some of the earliest sex-positive, non-oppressive images of women's sexuality were positive responses to criticism of conventional pornography, when we took on the criticisms not by discounting pornography but by making better porn.  But on the flip side, it is also where feminism got branded as puritanical, and where right-wing patriarchal opportunists jumped into the fray and represented themselves as being on the same side as feminism.  It is where feminism became an easy target for caricature as merely the old fashioned belief that women are somehow morally superior or just more high-minded and pure. The pro-sex/anti-porn conversation was still contemporary, relevant and real when I was coming out in the 1990s.  And it's a fact that all the historic feminist disagreements are present in our queer subculture's drinking water regardless of our acknowledgment or lack thereof. 

Debate is vital to community building. Open disagreement creates bonds while unspoken disagreement creates distance.  Respectfully communicating our disagreements and differences creates stronger connections, while minimizing or silencing them creates exclusion, isolation and alienation. One of the things I really appreciated about the obits for Andrea Dworkin was the suggestion that we need a feminism big enough to include her, regardless of what we think of her perspective, because it is a vital part of this vast, vast, vast thing called feminism.  And of course I believe feminism must always contain disparate and even contradictory points of view, because the deliberate absence of a monolithic, singular perspective is "essential" to feminism.  Feminism must always contain the essential idea of refusing essential ideas. Yet I thought the sex wars were settled and that pro-sex feminism had won.  Pornography didn't go away and neither did sexism, but public discourse opened slightly to include women's desires and pleasures.  Well, at least some women's desires and pleasures.  Well, at least some of those desires and pleasures...  

So here is where the third wave feminism panel comes in.  This version of feminism was still on my mind at the screening, when I was trying to figure out why people left. So here we sit with the so-called third wave which claims to be more inclusive.  I have been working on MIX festivals and community screenings since 2007 and this was my only walk-out experience, so I really needed to root around for all the tools in the toolbox to try and understand.  

The Brooklyn Museum panel was full of references to husbands, children and writing "slut" across your belly in red lipstick.  This particular version of straight feminism seems to have become all about a woman’s right to chose to stay home and to raise her baby exactly how she wants to; as if poor women and women of color ever had any choice about working outside the home and as if we had regressed to a point where it is assumed that all women want children. Their feminism seems unambitious, kind of like the assimilationist gay movement.  And yet I sincerely give them credit for their tireless work on the most egregious forms of the oppression of women. They are feminists, just as gay marriage advocates are activists. The trouble is how they skim the surface of our lives and spend their energy primarily on causes that will not change the fundamental injustices the vast majority of us live with every day. It's another case of the most privileged among us doing work that makes them feel better about the lives they are already leading.

What the panel espoused seems like such a personal and specific form of feminism, as though the third wave is the feminism belongs to the set of women who are daughters of second wave feminists.  But if your parents were older, like mine, or not feminists- feminism was certainly not in your drinking water the way these panelists claimed it was in theirs.  What I remember about feminism from the 80s and 90s was the backlash as described by Susan Faludi.  The message was that women were foolish for wanting to “have it all” and children had suffered from their mothers' ambition. I'm not opposed to the third wave, and certainly I take issue with different elements of every variety of feminism to date... each issue and every argument serves to make me more committed to feminism, not less so.  But enough waves already anyway, that's a metaphor that has seriously fucking outlived its usefulness! 

Yet this sort of watered-down, consumer individualist relatively sex-positive third wave feminist mentality was not what we encountered at the screening.  On the panel, the third wave feminists cited Tina Fey having her own show as a feminist accomplishment.  That means pretty much any woman doing anything could be considered a feminist accomplishment, since the content of 30 Rock is a far cry from liberatory and while at times funny, the show generally reinforces gender stereotypes and all the gay-related jokes have simply being gay as the punchline.  But even Tina Fey would understand, and any feminist should certainly understand in the presentation of sexually explicit images an opportunity to re-interpret what would appear to be traditionally het porn images in the context of feminist discourses of sexuality and pleasure.  Our audience wasn't tuned in to this and I am wondering whether they were turned off to the porn because they believe it exploits women or they were turned off because it was not sufficiently entertaining or accessible.  Or because the femme women in it didn't seem like "real dykes," which is a tired old misogynist trope in the lesbian community. I would gladly argue against any of these perspectives. All I can be sure of is that they did not want to see it, and they did not want to talk about it either.

Which begs the question of whether queer films are something we merely pay to see/consume, or part of queer people's unique culture that we painstakingly build through our full participation and love.  In which case, maybe walking out is a form of participation, but to me, it looks too much like doing nothing.  These questions were at the forefront of feminist dialogue years ago, and this experience made them feel as of yet unresolved.

If pleasure is no longer part of the feminist conversation, even contemporary pop feminism, then maybe the anti-porn feminists really did with the sex wars... I studied the sex wars and all I got was this lousy third wave feminism where wealthy white women train their husbands to change diapers! And queer alternatives that support patriarchy and consumers who walk away from sexuality.