REPOST: On My Lesbianism
reflections from a hard femme
Woooo boy it’s been a time, writing this thing. A friend recently pointed out (lovingly) that a lot of my posts give first draft, which is kind of the point!
So, I am reposting this first draft, because (a version of) it has been picked up to be published in Sinister Wisdom (the oldest surviving Lesbian journal for art & literature).
Holy!!! Fucking!!! Shit!!! The blog is doing what I set out for it to do and all I had to do was… be consistent? What a concept. Anyway, enjoy, or enjoy again, if you’ve read this piece before.
It’s hard to write an essay like this and not bump into cliches, but I am working on not caring because who here has lived a completely unique life? Exactly. When I first got the idea to write about being gay for Lesbian Visibility Week (how quirky of me), my first thoughts were about when I stopped shaving my armpits and switched to shaving my head as a teenager, and the first someone that told me she could eat my pussy for hours as I let her. But then my mind wandered into what lesbianism means to me from a gender perspective, what it means to me about the gait of my walk, the way my hands tap the steering wheel, the pretzel of limbs I become given any place to sit and more than 5 minutes. My lesbianism is intertwined with my anxiety, with my grief, and with my pleasure.
In 2006, Time Magazine named Jamaica the most homophobic country in the world. Rainbow Railroad, a non-profit that works to provide asylum to gay people in unsafe living conditions, cites that 40% of their requests come from the Caribbean region as of 2019. This comes to me as no surprise, considering that some of the most popular dancehall that’s come out of the country contain lyrics like: "When you hear a lesbian getting raped/ It's not our fault ... Two women in bed/ That's two Sodomites who should be dead” (some Elephant Man song). Homosexuals are perceived and treated as unapprehended criminals in the Caribbean, and for that reason, I do not know when I will be back, if ever. For this reason, my lesbian kisses my anxiety. My biggest fear in life is not getting sick, it’s not the police, it’s not natural disasters. It is getting hate-crimed by an angry mob. I think about the man who was stoned and chased in 2013 and I get this shiver of fear that cracks my nervous system into electricity. The grip of christo-fascism in the islands is something I mourn over often. How could one species turn heaven into hell with the brute force of homophobic idealism? Also FUCK RASTAFARIANISM.
My father’s side (the Jamaican side) of the family pretends to not know I am gay. They feign the ambiguity of knowledge. My father has known about me kissing girls since I was 16 and still thinks, somehow, I will end up bringing some man to meet him, someone for him to hand me off to, even though he never held me in the first place and he knows I munch cat. Bill Clinton-ass logic.
My mom’s side (the Central American/a whole bunch of other stuff side) loves that I’m gay, probably too much. (My mother actually started dating women after I came out to her.) But at least I don’t have to hide who I am. I note the differences in where they are from because Costa Rica has legally banned discrimination against gays and has a lesbian bar in San Jose that has been open for 30 years called La Avispa (bucket list destination) while Jamaica still has so-called sodomy laws and the one major pro-LGBT organization operates mostly underground. There are gay bars in Jamaica, they’re just not exactly googleable. Jamaica is flopping around the “two-state solution” idea like fucking cowards and Costa Ricans have israelis posting shit like this on reddit.
I had the candied privilege of witnessing gay women in love fairly intimately as a kid, between the ages of 5 and 9. They were a butch-femme couple with a child, and I saw them every Christmas at my uncle’s house, and I played with their daughter, who seemed to be missing her two front teeth the entire time I knew her. I always remember them being the most content and genuine out of everyone in the very full room, including my parents (whom I guess are now both lesbians). The Butch (one of my first crushes) always brought such generous and thoughtful gifts for me and all the other kids, because of course. Even as a child, I could see how much they cherished each other and the life they made together, and I knew I wanted that for myself. I thought everyone deserved to have that. Later on, when I was a teenager, they suddenly broke up and I saw The Femme had married a man, seemingly in a hurry. The next time I saw her, she was with The Man. She looked dead inside. Her eyes were empty, her skin was grey, and something about her whole family’s dynamic had changed. Compulsive heterosexuality kills, and there is masculinity that controls and masculinity that helps something grow, is the conclusion I came to. I never saw The Butch again and I ate pussy for the first time a month later.
A static identity is something that has never been keen to me. And because of this, I contain feelings of… fraud? Something about the fluidity and expansiveness of my humor, my body, my gender, my sexuality, my desire, make people wary of me, like they are certain I have some sort of malintent. I want many complex things and I am many complex things. Sometimes, things that directly contradict. I come from many places, so my only real home is my skin. White cisheteropatriarchy actively teaches others not to trust people like me, which I find to be a classist and anti-nomadic sentiment. All that’s sure is change. Change is my lesbianism. The moon changes signs every two days. The seasons change every three months. And so on.
“Hard femme” has been my most consistent flavor of genderfucking throughout my life. Like, determinedly, clumsily, riding a citibike fifty blocks up First Avenue with bleeding knees (from eating shit on 86th and having rich fucks laugh at you while they eat their shitty rich people food) and serious pit stains in a mini skirt, lace panties with pubes peaking through with every pedal. Very hot. Like yeah I smell bad and yeah you like it. I really like frilly things but not more than I love dirt, and messes, and things that smell. Hard femme like I started (and then stopped ) T so my voice would be huskier because it’s sexy to me. Also it didn’t work I mostly got acne, super intense periods, more prickly neck hairs and moods that swung into rage and despair instead of sadness and despair. Hard femme like my abundance of tit reads QUEER TONGUE ONLY.
If the world included only colored dykes, my tits would always be free. But cis male gaze exists, white queer gaze exists, so I wear big clothes a lot of the time to protect myself from the sight of the straights and to be read as queer by the queers. Even and especially when it’s hot. So, I have often ended up in this strange place where the people I want to be attracted to me aren’t seeing me for who I am, because walking these straight streets the way I would want to gives me extreme pangs of anxiety in the chord that runs from the back of my brain through my chest, to my stomach. So, me and my boobs will see you at the beach, okay? And you will just have to trust that I am queer in this outfit because I am telling you I am, OKAY?
When I present more femme-y I experience unbearable instances of complex heterosexism from gays and straights alike. For some reason, many people (and by that I really mean black and latino straight cisgender men and white queers of all identities, but especially twinks) titties=straight. Fatness and blackness in the same body=straight. I try to understand why this is, but I just don’t have time. Bastard activity from men I can toss aside, but being treated like an outsider from the community that’s supposed to embrace me makes me question being alive. I feel like I have been shackled to men/patriarchy in the minds of my peers. Heterosexism is generally defined as the notion of holding straight relationships in higher regard than homo ones but I would extend that definition to also include any instance where a person is assumed to be straight arbitrarily. None of this is helped by the fairly widespread notion that being thin and white is a prerequisite for “true” queerness.
I was invited out to this book talk at Quimby’s Books on North Avenue and it was a quaint change of pace from being in my house except people were still mean to me. While I waited for the person who invited me, someone with black boots and fluffy brown curls knocked the zine I was reading out of my hands “accidentally” as they stepped over the bright-pink fallen zine, like it had just appeared there and there wasn’t a person fully reading it. Sometimes I want to gaslight myself and say “I am just moody they didn’t mean anything by it”, but the lack of intention is the problem. I could never not notice that I knocked something over. I wish I was that ignorant to myself. Gay space does not inherently equal safe space, everybody, try harder.
Anyway, this is always how I am treated in queer centric spaces (and also kind of everywhere) in Chicago: invisible. Two people that I had met at a birthday party (one of whom watches my instagram story literally every day) pretended to not know me. One avoided me completely, I didn’t see her after the talk. The other I found outside while talking to the person I came to meet (who seems to have local clout, which made people ignore me slightly less) and I taxed them a cigarette, for my patience. Because I remembered they smoked because we fucking met at that fucking birthday party. I often wonder what makes me not worth including in certain places. Or maybe the difference is that they were feeling nicer because we’d all been drinking. Reason to go sober #***: alcohol gives you (and the other person) a false gauge of someones tolerance for negroes. Chicago’s queer punk scene is getting an F from me, for the moment. I’d also like to add I have gone out in Chicago maybe 5 times in the 2 years I have lived here and have been groped in those spaces at least 2 of those times. Always in queer spaces.
In Chicago, I feel very attractive, but in the way that people think I am freakish and do not want to be my friend, lover, consistent fucker. They want to watch from a distance, mostly. And when they do want to get close they just want to have sex (the type of sex where only what they are feeling is what matters and also no more than once).
In Atlanta, I felt myself on the cusp of true, full desirability, but not conventionally attractive (read: thin) enough to be seen making out with in public (unless molly got involved, and then it would be fully unacknowledged once sobriety called) and definitely not a viable dating option. I was mostly good for creative and financial extraction while being completely de-sexed and hyper-sexualized at the same time. Atlanta and Chicago are similar in that people always saved me for after dark, like a guilty treat.
In New York, I make people nervous. But the difference is they will still come up and talk to me, even if they have a little trouble holding my eyes. I feel seen. I don’t ever feel like the weirdest one in the room (because I am definitely not). I feel appreciated for showing up as myself. Interactions tend to be slightly more tender. People make plans with me during the day.
From what I can tell, I am the only black dyke in my immediate neighborhood surroundings. But I really just think they, like me, never leave their apartments and walk really fast to their destinations when they do.
When I leave my apartment, I am usually leaving the state, or, if I’m lucky (and luck is often on my side), the country.
Every queer scene and/or community I’ve witnessed or been a part of is unparalleled from the one I experienced before it in most of the ways that matter. One thing that remains is this idea that an individual should be easily pinned into a sector of the community, have no more than three words that convey to others their subculture, gender, and sexual position, and I simply do not think I can do that. Not to be like “I was born in the wrong generation” (ew) but I do yearn for a time where gays had less language available to us. I think, at one point, the unsaid or the undefinable was a major part of getting to intimately know another queer person, and people knew themselves and their comrades/friends/partners as ever expanding universes, to be forever-discovered instead of identity cliques. I don’t want any of us to ever have to water ourselves down, especially not for each other. I want us to talk about our Selves in depth to each other1.
My lesbianism is my emphasis on pleasure-based experiences, meaning, doing what you want because you feel like doing it and we all deserve to feel good as a bare minimum reward for being alive, and because pleasure and grief co-habitate in the mind. This doesn’t have to be sexual, but I think it’s nice when it is.
Being pleasure-focused means having (or, more likely, taking) the time to slow down and watch flowers get eaten out by bees so they can make honey. It means getting caught in the rain on purpose, ideally because wherever you’re going doesn’t care if you’re soaking wet. It means complaining and doing just that, without looking for solutions for a second, the pleasure of bitching and being loud about it, and having no one tell you to be more grateful or some other bullshit. I find pleasure often does not involve moving forward, it’s about staying right where you are and doing it like that again, please.
I knew I was going to grow up to do something involving sex and bodily pleasures after seeing two dykes at Fort Lauderdale beach in Florida wash off their dildo after what I could only imagine was a lovely afternoon. I was about 10. One watched endearingly as the other tenderly stroked the silicone with soap and water from the beach shower before placing it in its bag. The dildo was blue. My first dildo was blue (and too big. Common mistake, I think).
My point is, I don’t think I have ever been more curious about anything than I have been about the various ways people can pleasure each other and the reasons why it isn’t so easy in our reality of monopolized terror. That is why my day work is centered around sexual health and domestic violence. The more I write about it, the more I can feel myself chipping toward a path of spending my days continuing my sexual curiosity and fostering healthy, grounded community at the same time (without a boss). All of this is My Lesbianism.
What I Read This Week:
On Being Hard Femme #1 — Jackie Wang
Slow Pleasure — Euphemia Russell
like what else do we fucking have, seriously