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.

Number 19

One evening I started to develop intense pain on the left side of my jaw. I went to bed hoping I could sleep it off and woke up needing to see the dentist immediately. He took some x-rays and could not find anything wrong. He tapped on individual teeth with various instruments but everything hurt. He asked me if anything happened, if I fell or anything hit me in the face. Nothing like that happened. The dentist thought maybe it was just an infection so I got some antibiotics and hoped for the best.

A couple days later, I was back. Still no sign of tooth decay, and nothing wrong on the x-ray. My dentist sent me for a second opinion, to a specialist. I went to the specialist's office by the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge and she took an x-ray and examined my mouth. She said #19 was cracked and asked me if anything happened, if I got hit in the mouth or got into an accident or anything. I said no. She said, "Even a long time ago? Even when you were a little kid?"

Well, yeah, when I was little, my brother punched me in the face. But that must have been something like 25 years ago at this point. Was it on the left side? Fortunately fist fighting was not a regular occurrence, so I remember it clearly. I had my back against the inside of the front door of the house. My brother is left-handed, and I blocked 3 predictable lefts in a row, but he surprised me with a right to the jaw. That would be my left side. He is seven years older than me. I must have been around 10 or 12 years old at the most. I remember not feeling anything. My mom was there. She took me for a walk. She didn't prevent it from happening and she didn't discuss it with me afterward. We left my brother at home and went for a walk.

At some point during that walk I realized my mouth was throbbing. I didn't say anything. There was no doctor or dentist visit. My mom, brother and I acted as if it never happened. The privacy of the patriarchal household allows for an infinite number of atrocious events to go unseen and unregulated. Often I am sincerely grateful that things never got worse than they were, because there was absolutely nothing stopping them from escalating. The possibility was always there.

The second opinion dentist said I needed a root canal and more likely an extraction. She said some other things that didn’t register after the word "extraction," and put an x-ray into an envelope for me to bring back to my dentist. So I wandered out of her office back into Chinatown, thinking about all this personal history.  My own dentist couldn’t see me immediately, so I had some time to spare for walking and thinking. I walked further downtown to my dentist, whose office is near City Hall, and he still felt reluctant to drill because the x-ray didn't actually show anything. He said once we open the tooth, there is no turning back, and he couldn’t live with himself if he opened a live tooth. (Really, Dr. Chen is a great dentist and quite a perfectionist.) But after some consideration, we it was root canal time.

Drilling down, he found that the tooth was completely dead inside and had been for a very long time. When I got punched, #19 cracked down the center from front to back, which is why the crack didn't show on the x-ray. My dentist explained that when we are young, the body is very resilient. "Your tooth was broken, and your body created a seal around it. First the damage was contained and then the tooth died. It was still functional until getting this infection." I am convinced the infection happened now because at age 36 I finally have sufficient strength to allow this injury to see the light of day. The tooth had to be literally opened up and exposed in order to be repaired. So I have to open up too and acknowledge what happened. Christopher punched me in the face hard enough to break a tooth.

I learned that a root canal is a process and not a single procedure, so I was walking around for about a month with this old injury opened wide.  The dentist would check about once a week for whether the infection had cleared, each time putting some antibiotic powder into the drilled out tooth and covering it up with a bitter wax barrier.  Finally when the infection was gone, he sealed up the roots and the top of the tooth with care that the seal hold the two halves together. I’m almost grateful that I had to go around for a while, conscious of this opening, part of a history that needs to see the light of day in order to heal properly.  It’s still in question as to whether this tooth will last long enough to get a crown or whether it will eventually need to be extracted, but knock on wood, it’s doing pretty well right now.

When I told this story to my team at work, somebody asked light-heartedly if I was going to call my brother. I responded that he is in a residential mental institution. This is accurate but not a response to her question. The real response is that I won’t call because I no longer have a relationship with him. If he were out in the world today, I would similarly choose not to have any relationship with him, and in fact take measures to prevent him from getting my contact information. It was only when I was younger and living with my parents that I had no choice in the matter.  When I was in my early teens, him being institutionalized relieved me of the burden of having any relationship with my brother. I could attribute the lack of relationship to being institutionalized. But at this point it is my decision and I know it is the right one. I don’t need the mental institution as an excuse, and I don’t constantly worry about him potentially being released the way I did during his early years there.

My brother was hospitalized a number of times through out my childhood. Each time he was discharged from the mental hospital after a short stay, we didn’t talk about it.  He would be gone for maybe one or two weeks and my mom and dad and I acted as if nothing had happened when he got back.  I didn't get any explanation for why he was there and I didn't know what treatment he was getting and I didn't know what was expected to change as a result of the hospitalization. I heard terms like “brain damage, learning disability, manic depression.” Somehow I knew I wasn’t supposed to ask. There were always some topics that were taboo.

After these periodic hospitalizations, no one asked my brother what it was like and no one said welcome back. Nothing marked the event or encouraged any improvements in his mental health, nothing acknowledged what he experienced or ostensibly got out of the psychiatric care he was getting, nothing changed in anyone’s behavior or relationship to him. So surprise, his mental health did not improve. I only remember a sense of relief when he was gone. Years later, after he was gone and my mother was herself hospitalized for depression it was the same pattern again, no welcome home, nothing discussed.  But this time we met with the doctor and he said we should be “supportive.” I don’t think we knew what that word meant.  I was a teenager and honestly did not know what it looked, felt or smelled like to be supportive. I was literally puzzled over that word.

It’s not that I think talking about my brother or mom’s mental health would have made them better or would have made my life better. But I do believe banning talk of them made things worse. As a kid, I wanted to bring stuff up all the time but was threatened with trips to the psychiatrist myself whenever I tried. So I became very adverse to bringing up problems directly or asking for what I need in relationships, and this aversion kept me out of the psychiatrist’s office and kept me on the self-styled “sane” side of the family with my father.  This so-called sanity was characterized by silence, isolation and rugged individualism, all qualities associated with conventional masculinity. I became the strong/silent type, an unhealthy archetype if there ever was one.

The reluctance to speak came with me when I moved away from my parents.  And it became a strong contributing factor in two subsequent relational train wrecks: First when my ex-girlfriend brought a straight white monogamous male into our queer poly household and I did not take up the fact that his values and behavior were totally out of sync with the vision for our house. Second when she started to demonstrate values and behaviors herself that were in direct conflict with what was once our shared vision of queer utopian kindness, honesty and responsibility. Both times I waited until the situation was a total crisis to clearly and directly set limits and expectations for how I want my life to run, specifically for the way people can and cannot behave towards me. Since I grew up with somebody whose behavior was profoundly unacceptable, and my desire for things to be different was pathologized, it is no surprise that part of me believed I should just tough out other people’s mendacity. This undercurrent of silence is still present, but now a bigger and louder part of me is committed to dealing explicitly, even strategically, with the unacceptable shit in all areas of my life. Mendacity!

My brother was a minor the first time he was arrested.  He and my mom and I were eating at Burger King in the mall. The two of them were fighting and he flung everything off the table on to the floor and stormed out. I can't remember or imagine what I thought of the whole thing, but remembering this incident makes me also think about how the two of them fought constantly.  Something happened with the security guards and the police were called, the mall being outside the privacy of the patriarchal family home.  He spent the night in jail, and I don’t know exactly what happened but I know “resisting arrest” was one of the charges.  Within a few days he was briefly hospitalized and then released.

One event that stands out in my mind was a time he came home with broken glasses and a bloody broken nose. No explanation given. It turned out he had been to see a girl that night. What registered for me immediately was that a girl had prevailed in fight with him. Only on second thought did I consider the reason she resorted to hitting him that hard or more likely with some object. He often talked about what he wanted to do to girls. I cannot think of any other time in my life I have been so happy to see a person physically injured.

When my brother turned 18, my father kicked him out of the house.  My father had been very vocal about counting down the days and when it finally happened, I was so relieved. Shortly after my brother got his own place, he was arrested again.  He had some kind of fight with his landlady, a fight that resulted in her son calling the police on him. This time the court system did not release him and he was hospitalized instead. As far as I know, he has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Eventually he went to the institution where he resides to this day.  I don't know the name of it and I have never visited him and I do not plan to visit him. For years I felt like I couldn't tell anyone about this decision because they would think I was heartless, or maybe because I believed that I was heartless. The broken tooth gave me a reason to look back through adult eyes and really understand for the first time the reasons for my decision to end my sibling relationship entirely.

 

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.