Archive for July, 2011

31 Jul

I Can Put My Toes in My Ears

Posted by phonaesthetica in body image, CrossFit, weightlifting.

I love CrossFit. It’s the anti-Curves: No 2-pound pink dumbbells; no scales; no mirrors; no money funneled into right-wing politics. Just weight platforms; weight vests; long skinny weights; fat round weights; weights strung from ropes. Some chin-up bars. Tractor tires.

I don’t hear much dysmorphic body talk among female CrossFitters. Not a lot of noise re: thigh circumference*.  We focus more on what our bodies can do, and although there is a CrossFit body ideal (defined; sinewy) few women are trying to ensmallen. They do the workouts; lift the weights; and let everything fall where it may. Very good.

But I do notice a different kind of obsessive self-abegnation dressed up to look like passion, e.g. pushing until you get hurt. Injury somehow makes you a serious CF athlete. Many trainers (mostly young men) encourage lifters to push more and more weight — even after they lose their form — while the rest of the class yells “GO YEAH YOU GOT THIS YOU GOT THIS” from the sidelines. (I hate yelling at people as much as I hate being yelled at).

Ostensibly, you’re only supposed to compete against yourself, but each workout is timed — and everyone’s time goes up on the whiteboard for easy comparison. Everyone — big guys/small women; young/old; beginner/veteran — does the same workout. CrossFit gyms love to put up photos of members’ kinesthetic suffering: palms blistered and bleeding from the pull-up bars; shins bruised and scraped from the barbell. Showing weakness or discomfort merits only-sort-of-kidding scorn. Sometimes I hear the word “pussy,” and not like I like to hear it.

Guys brag about hurting their backs while deadlifting 450 pounds, as though it were something to be proud of rather than evidence of a personality disorder and/or a childhood spent licking lead paint.

Lifting too much + Lifting too quickly + Sloppy form = Injury.

Injury = Pain, debilitation, and sidelining yourself for weeks or months.

Even worser: These doods often feel free to comment on women’s bodies via athletic negging: ”Your legs look great…but your shoulders are underdeveloped. Work them harder, and you can create a V-taper to make your waist look smaller.” Women new to fitness, or over 40, get tokenized to prove that CF caters to all ages and fitness levels — but the zeitgeist of the place runs them off if an injury doesn’t. To them, I say: Life is sadistic and masochistic enough outside the gym, so pick a place and a trainer that trust you to know your own body.  And: admitting your limitations doesn’t mean a bad or fearful attitude.

And don’t do headstands. What are you, six? Just…don’t.

 

*Shopping for pants makes me cry, for reals. Size 0′s fit my waist and rear, but my thighs are just not having it.

30 Jul

gratitude

Posted by phonaesthetica in Uncategorized.

You cannot be grateful without possessing a past. That’s why we have to train children to say “thank-you” like they mean it. As I age, the past widens and accumulates, thereby yielding more clearly demarcated areas of gratitude. Things like hot fudge and thunderstorms and a friend’s voice on the phone become objects of deep-marrow thanks. Nothing is wasted. This is a sign of getting old.

29 Jul

I don’t “believe in” your eyebrows; yet you still have to pluck them

Posted by phonaesthetica in numbskullery, politics.

I never want to give numbskulls any attention — unless they’re in my classroom and I have federal and state funds to address said numb-skullery — but the “tags” feature on WordPress makes it impossible. Having a “feminist” tag does me almost more harm than good. People’s Exhibit A: This morning I ran headlong into the disingenuous ravings of a doodbro who “believes” that he shouldn’t have to “tax support” anything he doesn’t “believe in.” Like, say, abortion.

The scary thing is, doodbro has company. Individual Americans are increasingly missing the reality  that, as George Costanza would say, “We’re living in a SOCIETY here.” Not only do they feel entitled to their own opinions, they feel entitled to their own FACTS. Don’t “believe in” libraries; roads; hospitals? Hey, you’re an individual with individual choices to choose! Take a stand!

Here’s a partial list of things I don’t “believe in,” yet still pay for:

1. Parents who choose not to vaccinate their children. Kid comes to school with mumps; measles; smallpox; yellow fever; some other near-eradicated 19th century disease and starts a mini-epidemic? Medical bills for me! And not just MY bills — I also get to help take care of everyone who relies on state health insurance.

2. “Crisis pregnancy centers.” (That’s a post of its own).

3. Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

4. People having 5 or 6 or 7 children they can’t support.

5. Tax breaks for heterosexual married couples, when homosexual couples can’t have them.

6. School vouchers.

7. Copies of Michael Savage’s book in the public library.

8. That crazy bastard who sets up a big, ugly anti-choice display (with full-color posters) on the University lawn yells at female college students all day, twice a year. Maybe I don’t want to support the university with my tax dollars, since they’re the ones letting him do it.

9. Medicare for old people who vote against marriage equality.

10. Trash collection. They’re really loud, and they wake me up every Monday at 6 a.m. Maybe I don’t “believe in” collection; I want to take my trash to the dump myself, and everyone else can just deal.

11. The Congressional gym. Obviously, no one is using it.

24 Jul

What I Want to Believe About Love

Posted by phonaesthetica in love.

I want to believe that love is never wasted. That it accrues somewhere, like the green stamps my grandmother used to get at the grocery store, until one day you can trade it in for the karmic equivalent of a very nice Tensor lamp.

24 Jul

Rich Kids (Working as a Village-For-Rent)

Posted by phonaesthetica in feminist, travel, work. Tagged: , .

The most profound mind-fuck of my existence — and the competition is stiff  – was working as an illegal nanny in Canada. After being raised upper-middle-class on the U.S./Mexico border, the experience was a welter of uncomfortable race/class/privilege epiphanies from start to finish.

I logged hundreds of hours in the eight-bedroom homes of white people who fancied themselves “progressive,” with a “child-centered parenting style” (i.e. their overprivileged, entitled, ill-mannered spawn stomped all over them with tiny Uggs). I washed expensive dishes; pushed German-engineered double strollers; watched working mothers marinate in guilt while stay-at-homers unleashed their competitive instincts on the playground. Psychosocial minutiae was imbued with portentous significance by armies of specialists paid to address the kids’ ADHD; their Gifted and Talentedness; their hazelnut allergies. Every organic cheese stick was a building block to greatness. Bike helmets in the driveway! Raspberries cut into quarters!

I was an anthropologist of assholes.

One family had inherited the sort of wealth that permitted NEITHER OF THE PARENTS TO WORK. Yet, they hired full-time childcare as well as a weekly cleaning woman (she and I used to look at each other and scream with our eyes). The husband spent most of his time in his “office” on the fourth floor, where he worked on a novel that was never published; the wife hung out in her “studio” and did “cake-decorating art.” They’d both come down for breakfast, then tell the kids, “We’re going to work now!” I’d smile exactly the same way I did when the two-year-old picked up the garden hose and said “I’m a fireman!” These parents were “child-centered,” which meant that said two-year-old was allowed to choose how we spent our day. He would often, as two-year-olds do, change his mind 10 minutes into an activity, and then we’d have to drive somewhere else across town.

“I thought Bratlon and I would go to the park today,” I told his mother one morning.

“But…does he want to?” she asked worriedly.

She had a massive SUV — a Toyota Embargo Crusade or something — and when I drove it to Whole Foods, people wished me dead. I didn’t blame them. All the other nannies were from the Philippines, and they thought I was Bratlon’s mother. They wouldn’t talk to me. I fit in nowhere . And every day I thought, This is the life you could have had if you’d taken the path you were raised for. If you weren’t a dyke. If you wanted children. If you’d gone to law school. If you got your shit together. If. I also thought, Raising kids can’t possibly be the most fulfilling pursuit on earth, because if it were, this playground would be full of young fathers and male nannies.

I didn’t want their lives, just some of their security and comfort. I wanted to go home to people to loved me; who weren’t angry post-op transsexuals. It didn’t seem too much to ask. One night, I was broke but I craved something real, authentic, the best of its kind, so I bought a Calphalon pancake turner for $24. More of a symbol than a tool, really.

I also worked for a few nightmarish days for a family awaiting the arrival of their permanent nanny from Oaxaca (ironically, she had papers and I did not). This family was a smug melange of Wii; free-trade organic rosemary hand lotion; piles of V-neck sweaters with Latin school crest and motto. They made it clear that they chose me because I was white; that if they’d found me earlier I’d have been hired long-term. I spoke “good English.” (I fantasized about infusing the kids with accents; maybe a heavy Bronx intonation or a homosexual Pakistani lilt).

“Our last one was from Mexico, as well,” said the mom. “She hated the weather and kept crying to go home, until I had to say, ‘Look, Maria, I’m not your mother.’”

“I see,” I said, remembering all the shy, black-haired Marias from my childhood. Once, when I was 11, the day I left $200 in cash in a pair of jeans: a Maria folded it carefully and returned it to my mother, who tried to tell me how wrong the whole thing was, on so many levels, but I didn’t understand.

I remembered it again when the 10-year-old strode into the living room carrying a pile of bright new bedding, dumped it on the floor, and started up a vicious game of Wii bowling.

“These pillows cost FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS,” she told me in the voice of someone who had never been told ‘no,’ who had never been lonely or afraid or hungry for more than a minute; who knew herself to be the most important person in a benevolent world. ”You’re picking me up from school tomorrow,” she announced. ”My last nanny was the worst nanny in the world — she forgot to come get me at school.”

Here, she pulled out her best immigrant imitation: “‘Ohh, Mees, I forget to come geeet yooou, so sorrry!’”

“We’re getting a dog,” she informed me, hurling the imaginary ball down the imaginary lane. “What kind of dog it is, is extremely secret. It’s a very special mix of four rare breeds, and it is HIGHLY intelligent. We’re going to Paris this summer because my dad has a conference there, and we’re going to Israel for my Bat Mitzvah. I’m one belt away from my black belt in Tae Kwon Do.”

My phone started to ring. It was their mother, telling me she was going to be late.

“THAT’S an annoying ringtone,” said the kid. “I was in gymnastics for six and a half years. I can do an aerial. Watch. Watch me.”

23 Jul

Transilient

Posted by phonaesthetica in dyke, heartbreak, lesbian, trans. Tagged: , , , .

You know what ruined documentaries for me? Being in one. Because now I grok how that particular sausage is made. What Upton Sinclair is to the meatpacking industry, I am to cinematic verisimilitude.

The doc in question — about my transsexual partner, Jane, who was preparing for sex-reassignment surgery — did well on the American and British circuits. They probably loved it in Thailand too. Those crazy ladyboys!

Small parts of the movie represent reality; the rest is total bullshit. To wit: the filmmakers told us to be ourselves and to forget about the cameras. We weren’t and we didn’t. Neither did they. They’d started the project with a standard “woman-trapped-in-a-man’s-body” trans narrative: Jane was born a boy named Jim. See this childhood photo of Jimmy getting a train set for Christmas? Watch as it morphs into Jane putting on lipstick!

“So THAT’S where my fucking Crimson Glow SmileSlick went,” I muttered to Jane as we watched an early draft of the film. “I mean, I’m happy to share, but I just wish you’d leave it where I can find –”

“Shhh,” Jane said, re-loading her bong as the scene switched from our bathroom counter to the city skyline.

Early on, Jane had refused to give the filmmakers a photo of herself pre-transition. They found one online, e-mailed it to her and asked if they could use it. She went into the bathroom and puked; the same reaction she had the day I found an old electric bill with her former name on it.

“Damn, Jim forgot to turn off the lights,” I said, holding the bill aloft. “This thing reads like the defense budget.”

She froze. “If you ever find anything like that in the house again,” she said, “destroy it and don’t tell me. It’s in the past.”

I apologized and promised. Her pain was terrible — I could only imagine the cognitive dissonance, and I didn’t want her to be sad for even a moment. I would have crawled on my belly across a field of leeches to make her happy (and, by the end, I felt like I had). So, when she told the filmmakers that everything between us was great post-surgery; just absolutely awesome, I let it go. Even though I knew that a credulous viewer would come away with a false understanding of how transition affected her sexuality and our relationship.

And I wondered: How can one* hate a part of oneself so much and still be whole? How can one redact one’s own history like a North Korean censor and not marinate in shame? Shame not only about the history, but about the act of erasure? Doesn’t treating the past as though it were shameful create new and deeper shame? Wouldn’t it rob you** of your own experience as a tool for healing? Isn’t the past, in some ways, all we’ve really got?

The past. Ask any historian or survivor of violence: There’s no such thing. Everything that ever happened to you is still happening. The past has a vote; a wallet full of ticket stubs; its own apartment. The past is a fundamental ingredient in the recipe of our humanity, and omitting it means a cake without flour that you insist is pudding but only tastes like pudding if you eat it drunk and in the dark.

 

*Yes, “one” is pretentious, elderly teacher-speak. Am doing the pronoun dance.
**I give up.

21 Jul

I Was A Self-Mutilator Before It Was Cool

Posted by phonaesthetica in feminist, radical feminism. Tagged: , .

Wouldn’t that be a great title for a book? All the others on the subject are such downers. So many played-out plays on “edge” and “skin.”

Cutting works. It isn’t crazy. It’s an effective practice in the short term, and women are good at surviving. That’s why my “Girls, self-mutilation is not the answer” speech — and if you work with teens, you should have one ready — differs from the copperplate.

Whether or not cutting is the answer depends on the question. If you’re asking, “Will cutting temporarily relieve my inner pain by relocating it to a designated outward locus rather than letting it weave, unfocused, through an amorphous emotional landscape?” the answer is yes. If you’re wondering, “Can I show other people how badly I’ve been hurt via a keloid roadmap?” again, it’s yes.

These questions are the ones teenage girls know how to ask. Here are some others they don’t always have words for:

How do I become a woman in a world that hates women?

What are some choices besides “virgin” or “slut”?

My boyfriend says he hits me because I make him mad; is that true?

Am I in love with my best girlfriend; is that wrong?

How fast can I run? How hard can I throw? How hard can I kick a soccer ball?

Why do the women in magazine ads look unconscious? Why are their mouths always open?

Why do ads for violent porn pop up onscreen out of nowhere? 

Why can’t I walk down the street without being bothered/leered at/propositioned? Why do I feel like it’s my fault?

Who can’t I say “no” to? What would happen if I said it?

What kind of work would bring me real joy?

Why am I never skinny enough?

Does anyone else — ?

Will you listen long enough to hear me?

20 Jul

Evolution of a Lesbian Radfem, Part the Second

Posted by phonaesthetica in andrea dworkin, body image, dyke, feminist, lesbian, radical feminism. Tagged: , , , , .

September 1988: I am 14, composed almost entirely of frizzy hair and socks. Because hair products haven’t yet gone beyond Aqua Net and Dippity Do, I am bullied and invisible by turns. One day, I catch the flu and lose several pounds. I feel light and airy. How much lighter and airier could I get? By spring, I weigh 86 pounds. My parents check me into a private psychiatric hospital , where I talk about my “control issues” and develop a huge crush on my female therapist. One day, a male orderly says I have big legs, so I throw pieces of my lunch under the table and lose a “level,” e.g. they confiscate my Walkman and I can no longer listen obsessively to my Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars cassette (“I quit/I give up/nothing’s good enough for anybody else/it seems“). When I get out, my family goes on a cruise to Barbados. The ship rocks back and forth with food, and I am the only person who eschews, rather than chews,* the midnight buffet. I feel powerful. I do not want to talk and I do not want to play shuffleboard. Neither does my mother. My father is furious. They are both unhappy with the suffocating constancy of bad wallpaper.

June 1989: I develop a huge crush on Dana, my outpatient therapist. I tell her I don’t know how to be a girl; I want to escape into the woods and never come back. I wrap and unwrap the fingers of my right hand around my left wrist to show her how thin I am. She lends me a scholarly book about women as “relational psychosocial auxiliaries” to men that makes a lot of sense after I look up “psychosocial” and “auxiliary” in Webster’s. I find other books: Geneen Roth’s Feeding the Hungry Heart, Susie Orbach’s Fat is a Feminist Issue, and everything I can find by Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Susan Brownmiller, Robin Morgan, Mary Daly. An old copy of “Our Bodies, Ourselves” proves simultaneously informative and titillating. Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse: ???. Marilyn French makes my head explode, so I give a copy of “The Women’s Room” to my mother. She doesn’t read it. But her mother, my grandmother already has — plus she subscribes to Ms. magazine; odd for a 65-year-old Mormon and military wife. Ms. magazine’s back page shows good advertisements that show women climbing mountains and ruling boardrooms, and bad ones that make women look like animals or something to eat. My grandfather rolls his eyes and says something about “strident bitches.”

July 1989: Sullen and inarticulate with everyone except my grandmother, I get sent to The Mormons in Mesa. The Mormons are my extended family — dozens of aunts and uncles and cousins who rise at 4:30 a.m. to pick vegetables for their End Of The World stashes. Stumbling through the cornfields, I sing 19th-century labor songs like “Solidarity Forever.” I really project. When I call God “She” — I’ve just read a book about patriarchal religion called “The Skeptical Feminist” — one of my eleven great-aunts freaks out. “What man has hurt you?” she asks. I don’t answer. It’s not like I can narrow it down. Hasn’t she read Marilyn French? The abortion wars are all over the news, all summer. I know enough to take it personally. When I go home, I start volunteering at Planned Parenthood even though I won’t have any kind of sex for another several years. As we seal envelopes together, one of the older volunteers asks me, if I’ve started my “moon time” yet. I don’t get it.

Sept. 1990: My parents divorce. The texture and flavor of their grief makes me think of Luminol sprayed on crime scenes — everything looks fine until OH DEAR GOD. I cannot stop eating. I drive to the drugstore for chocolate-covered cherries; jars of peanut butter; six-packs of soda — then eat in the car and throw up at home. My mouth tastes of chemicals. My gut cramps with laxatives. I’m 25 pounds heavier than I was in the hospital, and people are starting to express “concern” about my dating possibilities: Don’t I know men don’t like fat women? That if I keep on this way, I’m going to be unhappy? The difference between their concern now and their concern when I was thin is, they blame me. I am no longer fragile. I am offensive.

Shortly thereafter, I get hit with a severe bout of obsessive OCD. I have Bad Thoughts, primarily about religion and sex, and they scare me senseless. There is obviously something Very Wrong. I start praying and join Young Life (the evangelical high school youth organization). I try to live for Jesus; to have a clean mind and a spotless soul. I get baptized, but I also start cutting a lot of school because I can’t concentrate. I’m pretty sure Jesus is coming back soon. My best friend, Kaylee, has the most beautiful red hair I’ve ever seen and I want to be with her all the time. I hate her boyfriend. He’ s an idiot. I’m always having to wait for them to finish making out before Kaylee and I can go anywhere.

August 1992: I’m a freshman again, this time at a Southern Baptist university. I find myself looking up Women of the Bible and trying to figure out how they managed to be so righteous. I have a boyfriend two hours away in my hometown, primarily because a girl needs a boyfriend. A husband. Feminist books still buzz in my head, and I’m pretty liberal as far as students here go — I don’t, for example, think all Democrats are baby killers — but I feel terror at the thought of displeasing God. The OCD gets worse. Then I meet Amy, a walking collection of Darwinian estrogenic markers. My father says she looks like a TV star — and indeed, many years later when the WB network debuts, I’ll be reminded strongly of Amy’s perfectly symmetrical face. Every guy in our brother dorm goes nuts, in a Baptist gentleman sort of way. There are flowers, invitations, “God told me to marry you”s galore. I seethe and have no idea why.

Next, in Part Three!: I decide to marry a guy I’ve known for five months.

*Yeah, I know. Sorry.

19 Jul

Heartbreak and Healing: The most lesbian title for a blog post, ever, unless I add “dolphins” and “tracing the salty ridges of your seashell.”

Posted by phonaesthetica in dyke, heartbreak, lesbian, trans. Tagged: , , , .

The reason I stopped writing was, she murdered it. Which sounds blame-y, but I never bought the “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent”* thing. In my experience, people sure as hell do have the power to make you feel inferior; shamed; mind-crippled. Ask any middle school girl bullied into an eating disorder.

So, yeah: she murdered my prose style like Macbeth murdered sleep, except it happened 400 years later and I lack the dramatic skills to do it justice. When I think of her, I remember that trope about how a butterfly’s wings flapping in Holland can, through a complex chain of interrelated events, cause a devastating hurricane in Barcelona. Except her wings were more like Mothra’s, the fictional Japanese monster who was formidable in battle and also fertilized her own eggs.

We met because I wrote. She was a tech type who liked the fact that I made a living at it (people who have never worked in print journalism think it’s more exciting than it is. Unless you’re a travel writer. That rocks. I once spent a week at a Carmel resort, judging summer Rieslings and getting massaged until I lost the power of speech).

In those first few weeks we knew each other, I wrote electronic reams of comedy, tragedy, and history with lesbian erotica thrown in; also some solid love letters. The Tenant of My Affections thus secured, I relaxed.

You should never relax.

I salamandered around Toronto all that first summer, getting off at every subway stop to visit minimalist specialty markets for ingredients. I bought a lot of ingredients. Back then I specialized in American comfort food — pot pies, meat loaf, vegetable and potato masterpieces thick with drippings and thyme — but I figured since I was a new Torontonian, I should kick it up with spices measured and priced by the quarter-teaspoon by elderly Laotians and Balinese.

I wanted to feed her. I watched her eat with the avidity of a shetl bubbe and the lust of a dyke who thinks she’s finally found happiness. I ground pepper on her salads with a practiced and steady motion. I baked cookies — chocolate chip; chunky peanut butter; oatmeal raisin with fresh cinnamon. Mothra fluttered her wings in astonishment, having never baked anything from scratch.

“I’ve never seen this DONE before,” she kept saying. “I mean, sometimes my mother would bake scones, but I didn’t know you could BUY vanilla beans and crush them like that.”

Like I said, I relaxed. I was so fucking happy, I forgot to write. And then it was time for her surgery (“Operation Chop It Off!” she called it) and when she woke up from the anesthesia, we were over. Except I didn’t know it. It was a lot like the time I slashed my right calf to the muscle and it took 30 seconds to bleed, or when a little kid falls down with a huff and can’t draw a second breath to scream.

After the surgery, everything I did was suddenly and irrevocably wrong, and I could see all my offenses written across my forehead in thick black ink: Does Not Look Hard Enough For Yoga Teaching Gigs. Too Shy at Parties. Heteronormative.

Once, I lovingly called her “The Master Of The Grill” while we were making shish kebabs.

“MISTRESS Of The Grill,” she barked, spearing all the yellow squash.

She never touched me again. I memorized the shape of her broad, turned-away back like I was lost and it was a map. I got up in the mornings tasting bile and oily fear sweat. Two of the cats sniffed me and edged away, but the other — who was dying of cardiomyopathy — let me hold him. We stayed in the bed that smelled like my lover, our sick hearts beating and beating. I cried into my ears.

And I went mute. “As a sheep before its shearer is dumb, so he did not open his mouth,” I thought obsessively, dozens of times a day. You wouldn’t think a Southern Baptist university would give me the Scriptural tools to associate Jesus with rejection by a post-op transsexual, but the Bible offers something for any situation.

I thought that if I could write something transcendent, she’d remember why she loved me, and then she’d love me again. If I could just think of that one clean shining sentence, I could have her back. It was a quest. If I fucked it up, I’d lose everything. I lost.

Now I know that it didn’t matter what I wrote or didn’t write. And I think that my suffering — every drop of oily sweat and saltwater — made me more compassionate, but also more wary. I no longer believe that my life is necessarily bound for a happy ending; nor do I believe that love is solid. It’s breakable if you kick it hard enough, and it can also just sort of dissolve as if sprayed with corrosive chemicals.

I learned that if someone wants to walk away from you, you should let her.

Five years later, there’s a woman who loved me before she read a word I wrote; therefore, I can write. I’m not afraid that muteness, if it returns, might make her pack up her eyes and walk away. Words are not my currency; my Phillips screwdriver with interchangeable heads; my shining silver Thermos; my license and registration. If I can’t write enough, or if it isn’t any good, I’ll still be who she thinks I am. (Of course, it helps that we have no seismic gender-related issues. So grateful over here!)

 

*Eleanor Roosevelt, our first lesbian president. Seriously! FDR was sick a lot, and she basically took over.

18 Jul

I’m at an awkward age for a lesbian

Posted by phonaesthetica in butch, dyke, feminist, lesbian, radical feminism. Tagged: , , , .

…too old to wear a fauxhawk and start becoming a man; too young to have made spin art out of my menstrual blood at the Moonwomon Collective. I did hand-mirror my cervix at MichFest a few years ago, but it felt self-consciously retro, like watching Reefer Madness or making a meatloaf from scratch.

I enjoy the company of vintage lesbians online and at 70th-birthday potlucks. These dykes* can eat and talk and eat and talk for HOURS. That’s hard for me because sitting down too long aggravates my obsessive-compulsive tendencies.** The only time I ever stayed seated voluntarily from 6-10 p.m was election night 2004, and I was higher than shit for the duration.

This seasoned company means great presents. One couple, L. and A., who’ve been together as long as I’ve been alive, gave me a box of books left over from the women’s bookstore they owned together in New York. The back jacket blurbs are full of coy ellipses and weird butchy nicknames. Most fit neatly into the following subcategories:

1. 1980′s lesbian detective mysteries: “Jazz Gordon, cynical socialist lesbian feminist journalist, begins a relentless pursuit of a killer at a a down-and-out English girls school, and discovers that lovers and friends all have something to hide…”)

2. Bar dyke romances set in Greenwich Village: “Chris cannot satisfy the alluring, capricious Dizz, and now Dizz has become interested in George. But Dizz knows very well her power over Chris…”

3. Science-fiction novels set in a future where all males die: “America is under forcible quarantine by a world desperate to protect itself from a virus aptly named the Red Death. But one enclaves, a mysterious, uninfected women’s community known as the Gaians offers sanctuary…if they can be found.”

4. Earnest books about sexuality, such as Pat(rick, now) Califia’s “Sapphistry”: “When some lesbians have sex, they may see patterns or colors or hear snatches*** of music.”) There seems to have been political controversy re: dildos and leather. One copy of “The Joy of Lesbian Sex” has a long, carefully-written note on the flyleaf, but I can only discern a word or two (“Kat” and “forever”) because SOMEONE GOT ANGRY AND SCRATCHED OUT EACH LINE WITH GREAT FORCE. So, you know — not always dolphins and flowers back in the day.

5. Out-of-print poetry collections that make me weep: “I’m not a girl/I’m a hatchet/I’m not a hole/I’m a whole mountain/I’m not a fool/I’m a survivor/I’m not a pearl/I’m the Atlantic Ocean/I’m not a good lay/I’m a straight razor/look at me as if you had never seen a woman before/I have red, red hands and much bitterness” (Judy Grahn).

Knowing older lesbians is a better gift than any book. They whacked their way through homosocial territory before there were maps. No Internet, no Curve magazine, no Daughters of Bilitis, even — just themselves; their friends; their hopes and fears. Because of them, I’ll never have to watch my butch lover be humiliated on the sidewalk outside a dyke bar — “How many items of women’s clothing are you wearing?” Hideous as that story was, the whole room laughed hysterically when L. and A. told it — because how very, very long ago! How very, very far away! A cartoonish anecdote to tell from the head of a beautiful table; as made-up-sounding as the Red Death Gaian quarantine.

Their partnerships comfort me, too — someday, I can celebrate a long life with a lover in a home of our own.

I don’t want to “stand on the shoulders of giants” when it comes to my older friends and mentors — I want to stand WITH them. They can’t be replaced, and they should never take a backseat to anyone.

 

*Sometimes they don’t like that word, because it was hurled at them so many times before we sort-of reclaimed it. They prefer “Lesbian” — pronounce it with a capital L, like you’re reading the back flap of an Ann Bannon paperback — and “woman-loving-woman.” Yeah, it’s a lot of syllables, but it’s the least you can do.

**Like, I’ll start counting the number of words in people’s sentences, and then the number of sentences per person divided by the number of people at the table.

*** Hee hee omg lol snatches

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