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Writing queers me. A mischevious spirit lives in my writing process, grinning at my blindness and plotting to overturn my complacent self-understandings. In the course of the last decade, I have clung to straight, lesbian, bisexual, femme, androgynous and genderqueer identities. At each stage, my writing has hinted at the ways in which I escape my current label. Writing challenges me to explore and embrace my complex, shifting sexuality and gender. I began writing in earnest as a long-haired straight girl in a small New England liberal arts college. I applied to a fiction class and mused in my application letter, "I don't know if I deserve this more than the next person, but writing is the closest thing to the core of my being, and that is how seriously I take it." I began to write up a storm of slightly fictionalized memoir about my neuroses, depression, and misery with men. Then, out of nowhere, I wrote three little pages about my friend from summer camp, Natalie. I described our antics, from lingerie experiments to Venezuelan Yutz Hockey. I touched on my mother's disapproval and my habit of riding in Natalie's "Truck O'Life" and yelling when she turned the opposite direction from the way I pointed. The piece cost me no effort to write, but I felt uneasy walking into the meeting I had scheduled with my professor. "Do you think there's anything here?" I asked earnestly. "I mean, is there a story?" I was embarrassed at having given him something so embryonic, such a piece of fluff. My skinny, extremely sharp professor with a mustache like Groucho's leaned back in his chair. "Oh, I think there's a lot of energy here," he said, cocking his head to admit no argument. "There are also a lot of unresolved questions." According to him, I needed to figure out what exactly was the narrator's attitude to her own sexuality. With all the tension building up, was the question of Natalie's orientation ever addressed? How did the narrator respond? Dubious, but incited by his certainty, I rewrote the piece, describing a part of my life I considered precious but tangential to the main themes of boyfriends and dieting. In the story, after some wacky excursions to dance with vegetables in the grocery store and a few quiet moments arm in arm at sunset, Natalie does come out to me. My response is kind but vague, correct but awkward. That night, I stare at her breasts in amazement when she is changing. I get uncomfortable wrestling with her and move off to fall asleep, envying her courage and longing for her ability to "be herself." I muse that as a non-lesbian, I don't know if such freedom can be mine. Debates raged in class over my story. "The narrator is obviously questioning her sexuality," some claimed. One bisexual man retorted that the narrator's openness just made her a good straight ally. As the author, I was not allowed to speak or I might have expressed my frustration. The narrator was not questioning her own sexuality. They were missing the whole point about Natalie as an emblem of self-realization. I almost rolled my eyes as I marveled at the gap between writer's intention and readers' otherworldly interpretations. Writing and reading create an endless game of hide and seek. The vague connection between art and factual truth and the many layers of literary meaning make it easy to ignore a piece's troubling implications. It's amazing how glibly and how often I did this. In a poem titled "Oh yes," written a few months before my story about Natalie, the speaker proclaims, "Oh, I like women." She describes what it is that she likes, in metaphors like "their hips curve in a white rainbow," "their rage blossoms into a blood flower," and, "their breasts point ahead, asking gently." The "Oh" that punctuates the title and the first line implies a coy and knowing speaker. The sensual metaphors that follow are evocative but obscure. Does the speaker desire women? Admire them? Know some sinister or delicious existential secret that she will not state explicitly? Should erotic longing be taken as literal lust or seen as a metaphor for a greater longing? Another poem written a year earlier, "Betrayal," subtitled, "A woman to her goddess," begins: Dammit woman my own womanhood Is this a metaphysical union with the Goddess, a fantasy of self-loving, a hunger for another woman, or some combination of all three? The rest of the poem plays on the same ambiguity. I came out as a lesbian towards the end of a year dedicated to writing. A close friend disclosed her own lesbian secret, and my body froze. I barely spoke for an hour. It began to dawn on me that I, too, liked girls. That week, I burst out of the closet at a Pride rally, and one year later I moved to San Francisco with my girlfriend. I got a military haircut and sought out all things lesbian, from feminist bookstores to the dyke club scene to a pagan herb store and a women's bathhouse. My lesbian patriotism reached its peak when I became an organizer of the Lesbian Avengers, a radical direct action group with the slogan "We Recruit!" As I prepared poems for submission to a queer women's anthology in my fourth year as a lesbian, I noticed that the three I had selected were all about men: my father, a slam poet, and a transgender friend. The one in praise of the poet concluded: It occurs to me (a lesbian) "Hmm...," said the voice in my head. I knew I was pushing the margins of a lesbian identity. I wasn't going to rush anything. But I would be watching. Six months after I wrote that poem, I met a man at a massage workshop. The openness with which he held my gaze unnerved me. We partnered for an exercise, and I wondered at the warmth and ease I felt holding hands. We went out for tea afterwards, and I felt delight at the sun, his curly hair and our gentle yet earnest conversation. I scrawled in my journal, "I am writing myself back towards loving men, learning to speak to them in a different language, this time of power, this time of a gruff commitment to myself." For a few months, I believed I had a platonic crush. Then, I climbed on the back of his motorcycle and placed my hands at his waist. Each point of touch warmed me as I smiled into the wind. Who cared about a new label for my sexuality? Yet new words hovered, waiting for me to claim them. Since I'm still a mortal and still a writer, I have to feel a touch of uneasiness. What is my writing already betraying of my future self? I expect now that I will evolve out of my current framework, whether I like it or not. As I search old writings for hints of queerness, I notice signs that I was probing not just my attractions but my own femininity and masculinity. In San Francisco, I came to understand gender identity as fluid and distinct from sexual orientation. At poetry readings and workshops, I was moved by transgender people's stories. A close dyke friend surprised me by deciding to become a man. I watched his sense of excitement, awe and peace as he discovered his male self and chose to physically transition. Another formerly lesbian friend rejected the binary gender system, choosing a male pronoun but no physical alteration. I began to revel in the profusion of genders that could exist under the umbrella label "genderqueer." My writing began to hint at a dizzying sense that gender is not given, but up for grabs. I wrote an admiring poem to a transexual woman, declaring her the "native speaker" of femininity. I wished her well and renounced my own claim to true womanhood: May you have health If my dyke friends were not necessarily women, what was I? I began to reminisce about my delight in the role of Puck in my high school's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. I had scampered around the stage for weeks as the Fairy King's boyish messenger. I remembered musing to myself that the elf I became each night was not male or female, although I might be either in an instant if it pleased me. Among sympathetic queer friends, I began to try out the idea that "androgynous elf" described my gender better than "man" or "woman." When my friends nodded in recognition, and a stranger in the grocery store exclaimed, "Hey! Nice smile - you look like an elf!" I realized that this might be more than a passing fancy. Yet the overwhelming pressure to present myself as a woman and accept the division of people into male and female has led me to tuck the idea away. Can I handle another outsider identity? Would I consider coming out as genderqueer and exposing myself to the discomfort and bewilderment of people around me, even people who accept my attraction to women? I'm not sure that I'm ready to know the whole truth and to take it seriously. What exactly did I mean in the poem to the trans woman when I wrote that femininity was not my possession? Why did I dedicate a poem to my father in which I cut my hair and recognize myself in his high school picture? The poem describes my father's "delicate lashes, invading nose, new white skin, head cropped and bare," and then concludes: I see myself, like you, Does the identification with him imply a gender identification? Does "unshaped" refer to a kind of primary, helpless human self that precedes gender? I have no idea where that last stanza came from. I'll stop there. I'm scared to look any more closely at my writing over the years for signs that I really am neither boy nor girl. Yet I feel a certain comfort that the truth is there, waiting for me to be ready. When I played Puck, I reveled in the role of a trickster. I ran through the forest, spying and plotting pranks with a perpetual grin. I watched the fairy queen coo over a donkey and cried, "My mistress with a monster is in love!" I led two rivals in circles through the wood, egging each on in the voice of the other. I loved to play with the self-importance of mortals, showing how easily they could be manipulated, and how blind they were in their comfortable interpretations of the world. Society forces us to pick the truths of our sexuality and gender from a multiple-choice list. It's easy to grow deeply attached to these labels -- they follow us everywhere. Writing can celebrate and reinforce them. From "Take Back the Night" rallies to the slam scene to the queer, feminist and multicultural sections of your local bookstore, writing can assert power and self-love in the face of oppression. What this earnest practice often overlooks, however, is the spirit of Puck. Categories blind us. The lovers rush about the forest in A Midsummer Night's Dream, stubbornly sure they know who they love and who loves them. Puck watches - the mischief-maker knows the instability of passion and the frailty of blustering speeches. He engineers it so that everyone will eat their words before the happy ending. Many queer academics argue that sexuality and gender are socially constructed, not formed by an essential "human nature." Doesn't social construction imply that we all have the potential for queerness? That we are born with the capacity to desire various genders and live in various genders? What if the essential truth is one of queer possibility? I am living by that creed now, as I try to trick my queerness into appearing and watch it play tricks on me. Writing is the forest where I carry out this scary, delightful hide-and-seek. What is it in me that knows my queer truths before I know them? When I write, it feels as if someone in the mirror smiles knowingly. I'm not sure if it's a literal God or Goddess, or some kind of transcendent force within me. I don't have an ornate theology to go with my faith. But whatever it is, the divine has a touch of Puckishness. It delights in wrestling me to the ground and proving me dead wrong. After each trouncing, I raise myself up looking more and more like Puck myself. Some day, I will be racing through the trees, a girl and boy chasing women and men, laughing as I shapechange in a swirl of color. |
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12.07.06: Scarlet Letters -- in case it isn't glaringly obvious -- is currently
on an extended hiatus. The web has changed, we've changed, and
we're trying to figure out how we both fit together now, which isn't a process we want to rush. If you're looking for more current SL-related content, you can
have check out upcoming books from editor Heather Corinna and previous co-editor Hanne Blank, check out Heather's current sexuality sites, or explore sites through the femmerotic network. We hope to be back with you soon, as fresh, challenging and
unexpected as ever.
In the meantime, by all means, enjoy our years of past content,
all of which still remain in the public and subscription areas.
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