tie picture

I told you all I would get there eventually!  The colours are a little wonky here but you get the general effect.  This is a full windsor knot that I tied myself, btw.

The really nice thing about this tie is that I bought it at a vintage store the first day I put a rainbow patch on my bag — that’s how desperate I was to be seen, recognized.  A cute queer woman sold it to me, and she gave me that “I see you” smile.  I was on cloud nine!  I haven’t actually left the house wearing it yet.  I might need some moral support.

Though frankly having had it on for an hour or so now I’m amazed that anyone can stand to have anything around their neck like this (obviously I’m not much of one for high necklines and collars).  I feel constrained, and not in a good way!  I really want a bow-tie, though.  I’m still waiting for the right one to come along.  I saw one made out of vintage kimono fabric that I would have bought if it hadn’t been both really expensive and lavender — I don’t wear much purple of any persuasion, though this was a beautiful example.

I think we can all agree on one point though — ties rock!  Now if someone would just bring back the corset and the cravat my world would be complete.

a date!

ok Jess, she did it.  She took me out to dinner.  Now I’m not saying it was all due to your influence, but maybe you helped the idea along a bit…

The day you suggested it, a while back, it sounded like the nicest thing in the world to me, and I had to turn it down because of how much work I had to do.  I almost cried.  So when I turned in my last assignment for tomorrow at 6:30 pm, I was so excited — a free evening!  I belatedly took her up on the offer of dinner.  

It was really nice, because (in spite of the peacefulness reflected on our blogs) this has been a rough couple of weeks at our house.  We’ve had some explosive miscommunications, where our old patterns and insecurities sparked bad reactions, we’ve had strangers in our house disturbing our routines, we’ve both had an avalanche of work and varying degrees of success getting it done…the stressful list goes on.  

And I was thinking recently about being single, about what it would be like if I hadn’t gotten together with M.  Two of my sisters are single, and I wonder if I would be too.  Sometimes I crave that independence and freedom — the idea that I could do whatever I wanted to, just pick up and go off somewhere else and not be tied to a place and time and person.  

But M. got to my heart before I was old enough to know better.  Before my self was fully formed.  And as much as I might sometimes wonder what it’s like to move through the world without a partner, I admit I have no shadow of a clue what it’s actually like.  People hear how long we’ve been together (and produce the requisite gasp of shock) and then ask me for relationship advice.  And all I can say is I don’t know.  I don’t know why we’re still together.  I don’t know why other people break up, except that a lot of them never seemed to love each other very much.  I don’t know why when faced with things that seemed insurmountable we got over them anyway.  I don’t have any advice for how to find someone like that — it just hit me one day, like a tidal wave.  

One day I was a young unformed girl, with lots of adolescent angst about who I should love and would anyone ever love me and the next day there it was:  an obsession with the girl next door.  Well down the street turn right go half a mile turn left and the second house on the left.  Just there, the big white colonial.  I didn’t question it.  I thought even then that we’d be together forever.  I suppose I still think that, though the rational part of my brain scoffs at such a suggestion.

This is all to say that it was a really lovely date.  We laughed about how little she looks like her old IDs.  We talked about all sorts of things — how much we miss england, and our english friends.  Viscerally miss them.  We talked about gender, and the future, and the past.  We drank really good beer.  We ran away from acquaintances we didn’t want to talk to.  And somehow the conflict and the issues and the fighting just fell away.

So thanks, Jess.  Good idea

gratitude

I think I’ve been pretty negative here recently, but it’s more about healthy venting than truly bad stuff in my life.  When everything is going well, the few things that suck stand out like shining beacons of garbage, saying ‘look at me, look at me!’.  So this is a post about the things that are going right.

 

What are they?

Dancing,

school,

love life,

social life,

the weather,

the farmer’s market,

our apartment,

our new church,

my new friends both on and off line,

heck, even my family’s behaving well for the moment. 

 

What do I lack?  

Time,

sleep,

thigh-high fishnets,

a short black skirt,

and a solution to every problem.

 

(Well, a girl can dream…)

I am a militant humourless manhating lesbian.

I’ve finally, unfortunately, had personal experience of the less-tolerant members of this queer community.  A new acquaintance made a comment (basically denigrating older butch women, whom she described as militant as though that would be bad) which sparked a lot of discussion here at home.  Put that together with an obnoxious, offensive comment from a straight guy belittling our marriage (under the guise of ‘a joke’) and a deliberately loud and overhearable conversation from a group at a party as we were walking up the street to go home about whether we were ‘two girls’ or ‘a girl and a guy’, and it’s been quite the week.

All of this has left me feeling unprepared.  I didn’t smile and nod in agreement with the anti-butch comment (made in M.’s presence!!!), but I didn’t take the commenter to task for it either.  I didn’t laugh at the straight guy’s ‘joke’, but I didn’t defend myself particularly.  I didn’t run away from the group on the porch, but I didn’t say anything back to them.  What could I have done?  The one I feel most able to take on is the anti-butch (it hurts me even to type those words, they feel so wrong to me) comment, because that’s someone within this community who should know better.  

But what to say to the straight guy?  The immense irony is that we’re attending his second wedding today.  I made it clear that I was not amused by his comment in the moment, and he responded with the classic ‘haha it was meant to offend you and you rose to the bait you silly PC lesbian’.  So yeah.  Taking offense at his explicitly stated desire to offend me makes me somehow stupid.  But why?  Because he thinks I should be making fun of myself along with him?  I don’t think it’s ever occurred to him that I might make fun of him.  Certainly I don’t do it to his face, because in my ’silly’ universe that’s RUDE.  So instead, I’ll back away as fast as possible from this relationship and honestly do my best never to see him again, even though I believe that every person is capable of redemption, because ultimately it’s not my responsibility to be the agent of his self-improvement. 

And what to do with the drunken party group?  This one makes me the most angry, because it makes me the most afraid.  I could have called up to them to fuck off.  But what if they had thrown their bottles at us?  They were on the third floor, highly inaccessible to us.  Should we have held hands, put our arms around each other?  There was no way for us to have power in the situation.  They weren’t being friendly — they were mocking us.  I think it made both of us feel bad that we couldn’t protect the other in that situation.

*****

We went to see Melissa Ferrick play last night.  She was so good.  I just wanted to run up there and squeeze her.  You’ll be happy to know I restrained myself.  The proceeds from the concert were going to fund a scholarship for LGBTetc. youth at Berklee College of Music (she’s an alum) and I was so happy to be there contributing to that cause.  We need all the help we can get, frankly.  She was so amazingly awesome.  It made my week and gave me strength for the torture of today.

*****

And one more thing?  It couldn’t get more humid around here.  It’s pouring down rain right now, after two whole days of living at the bottom of a swamp.  I’m ready for some dryness, folks!  And I want to go apple picking!  And what am I going to wear to the wedding?  Where’s my femme mafia when I need them???

Labels: “tough-guy” femme

What is femme to me?  The title of this post is something that M. started calling me, perhaps having to do with my pronouncements about hurricanes.  I think it’s accurate — we were also talking about why it is that the attention from straight guys is much, much less than it could be (and has been in the past), and she said it’s partly because I can be intimidating.  It’s true — I have actually sneered at straight men who give me the eyeball.

So I am finally answering the question posted here; it’s something I’ve recently been thinking about a lot.  I have sometimes been tempted to define it in opposition to other things — not straight, not butch, not bi — but I’d rather try to think about it more positively here.

Femme was unconscious for me for so many years, and was marked by the contrast between my gf and me.  I wore dresses, M. wore pants.  M. opened doors, I walked gracefully through them.  I suppose on some level neither of us knew another way to be, another model for a romantic relationship; there were boys, and there were girls, and if you were both girls you had to pretend one was a boy so you’d know what to do.  

But it was actually much more complicated than that, because looking back, very few of the straight relationships around us modeled that kind of gentleman/lady interaction.  I mean, she brought me flowers on a regular basis.  She opened the car door for me.  She made all but one of many first moves.  She paid for our dates (I didn’t have a job, but I suspect even if I had she still would have paid).  And I was fine with that — no ‘I’m an independent woman!’ business here, at least not at first.

I think it was in about 2006 when I read the first chapter or so of Stone Butch Blues; I dimly saw myself reflected there, but I had no idea that it was possible to have those identities now.  I thought those relationships were relics of a different time, and I didn’t really allow myself to apply them to me.

So it wasn’t until this spring that I started to think of myself as a femme, when I finally found the queer blogging community and got to participate for the first time in discussions around butch/femme dynamics.  And from there it gets a little complicated, because at first I was thrilled — finally, a way to talk about my experience that included all the different aspects of my life; the hitting on by straight guys, the invisibility within the queer community, the lack of ability to tone down the femininity, even when it’s warranted, the deep and abiding attraction to masculine women.  And I was ecstatic for maybe two months, and then the insecurity started.  

Talk of submissive bottoming made me feel weird — was I submissive enough in bed to be a femme?  And then the skirts and heels — do I wear them often enough to count as a femme?  Do I remove enough hair to be a femme?  Before anyone jumps on this, let me qualify:  it’s not really my identity as a femme I was worried about, it was my image.  I know I can be a femme as long as I want to claim that word; but what will other people think?  Does my femininity have enough queer signifiers?

It shouldn’t matter.  Most of the time it doesn’t.  But in all these discussions of what makes a femme a femme, we are bound to call the value of each of our individualities and decisions into question.  Unless we all look identical, we will all have a different way of expressing our femininity, and sometimes we won’t agree on what is constitutive of femininity.  Nor should we!

But back to the original question:  what is femme to me?

Femme is not being victimized by my womanhood.  Femme is not being limited by my womanhood.

Femme is being strong, self-sufficient, smart.  Femme is taking ownership of my sexuality, and not letting other people control it or control me through it.  Femme is acknowledging my power as a woman.  Femme is embracing all aspects of myself, including the masculine ones; it is not being afraid to allow masculinity and femininity to coexist within one feminine, womanly body.  Femme is validating and supporting other people’s choices and genders, and expecting mine to be validated and supported too.  Femme is loving my butch beyond reason.  Femme is uncompromisingly working toward equality and justice, even though that means being in constant conflict with the people in power.  Femme is being part of a community with a history, standing in opposition of people’s expectations of us.  Femme is being myself, unafraid.