alligatorbutch

[alligatorbutch]

["I think you and I should practice kissing," she said. "Together. Like, not for real, just to build up our skills. French kissing. David went out with Michelle Richards for all of last winter. She went to Whitehouse Elementary before she moved to Porter Creek. You know what those girls are like. I'm going to need to practice. You'll have to learn too, you know, sometime, right? You can't just stick your tongue down a guy's throat. You need to learn a technique for it."

I have thought a lot about this moment in the many years since, flipped these few minutes over and over and studied their underbelly. Asked myself all the questions I could come up with. I was never in love with my best friend Janine. I never stared at her body when we were swimming or getting changed, I wasn't attracted to her in that way, ever. I only looked at her body to compare it to mine, which I always found lacking somehow. I was skinnier than her. I was paler. My chest was flat. So was my ass. I didn't like my body much, but I didn't desire hers either.

...

I have wondered many times about why I did what happened next, and what fueled the fear that curled up cold from out of my belly and made me jump to my feet. I can't remember if I mumbled an excuse or an apology or if I said anything at all.

I only remember leaping on my new bike and pedaling home as fast as I could. I remember barely stopping to lean my bike up against a post in the carport and fumbling to get the front door open. I kicked off my shoes and bolted through the kitchen and upstairs to my bedroom and slammed the door behind me.

Then I let the tears flood over my bottom lids and down my face. The hot, burning kind that make you make a sound in your chest you don't recognize as your own, a sound that catches at the top of your throat and tears a hold there before it escapes your mouth.

I didn't want to kiss my friend. Her lips were puffy and covered in butter and I didn't know how we would look at each other after, or what we would say, but that wasn't it. That wasn't what I was crying about. I wouldn't know for six more years what was still stuffed way down inside of me that scared me so much.]

ivan coyote, "i shine my armor every knight" from tomboy survival guide

#ivan coyote #lesbian lit #trans lit #butch lit #currently reading

[alligatorbutch]

[While being a femme sometimes renders me invisible in the eyes of the queer and straight communities, it can also open doors. After all, invisible women can use our stealthy wiles to access spaces that others can't, and while inside we might even be able to hold the door open for others. That might mean I can make it easier for my partner to use the women's washroom by chatting with her or asking to borrow a tampon, or engaging in friendly small talk with the nice middle-aged straight couple at the campsite next to ours, using my girl-next-door charm to distract them from wondering about my partner's gender identity.

It often means being the one to deal with authority figures. My "Type A" personality and ability to shift into business mode means I'm usually the one to negotiate the rental contracts for the queer cabarets I co-organize in my spare time. And I was the first choice to explain to two police officers why they didn't need to worry about our raucous Pride party getting out of control, even though the lawn was full of glittery, scantily clad partygoers of all genders and orientations. It worked, and they drove away satisfied. I bring my values into the privileged spaces to which I have access, like the fourteenth-floor boardroom where I politely but firmly explained to the chair of the national health research meeting why it wasn't appropriate to refer to transgender people as "its." I don't always care whether the people in these situations know that I'm a homo. I just want to use the tools I have at my disposal to do the right thing by my community.

Sometimes being queer while looking straight is about blending in, which has the potential to be a powerful and subversive act. You find out who your allies and your enemies are pretty quickly when they assume you're "one of us" (instead of "one of them"). Whatever you call it, femme invisibility or passing can help keep you and your loved ones safe. At other times, being a femme is about choosing to stand out, which can be synonymous with coming out—something many femmes get a lot of practice at. Think of it as a conscious, strategic use of privilege. Think of yourself as a hidden weapon in the fight for queer liberation.]

zena sharman, "looking straight at you" from persistence: all ways butch and femme

#zena sharman #currently reading #lesbian lit #femme lit

[alligatorbutch]

[What do we see when we look at ourselves? That all depends on how one defines identity. If identity is a box meant to contain all that you are, then any identity (Irish, secretary, mother, Christian) is anxiety-provoking at best and soul-killing at worst. That box can lead to one of two paths: on one path, you totally embrace and enshrine the identity—a position that often leads to absolutisms (i.e., girls do this, but they don't do that; Christianity only means this sex position).

Conversely, insistence on a box can lead to a total rejection of received identities, which is often the case with contemporary women and men living on the fruits of feminism, who understandably chafe at the idea of living in containment. With that rejection, however, we often get a personal life devoid of context or history; that, in turn, erodes any political power-base that could demolish existing oppressive cultural behaviors or institutions. (Whew! That's exhausting even to say!) For example, in the "no-identity-reject-the-box-at-all-costs world, sexism or child abuse become "incidents" that affect individuals, rather than a series of choices by a dominant cultures that injures a class of people such a women or children. The assumption is that each individual has the opportunity to overcome such incidents on her/his own. Imagine what human rights advances would not have been made during the Civil Rights Movement if too many African-Americans had decided that ethnicity is a purely intellectual/political construct, and there's really no such thing as being black in America. (This interesting discussion takes place in the halls of academe today, but rarely on the street corners where the unemployed congregate.)

What would it be life if each transgendered person felt, "I've chosen this personal path, and it's my work alone to keep people from discriminating against me," rather than identifying with a whole class of transgendered people and doing the work as a group to challenge discrimination? Dynamic political activism (i.e., feminism) to improve the condition of women (and ultimately all people) can't yet regain a foothold in the twenty-first century without women and men willing to acknowledge and open the identity "box."

If, however, identity is seen as a door, not a box, they you've got a very different and an extraordinary adventure.]

jewelle gomez, "femme butch feminist" from persistence: all ways butch and femme

#jewelle gomez #currently reading #lesbian lit #trans lit

[alligatorbutch]

[My vision of family begins with my mother. As my mother's daughter, there was no question about whether or not I would have a baby. I was in love with my mother, a big, round woman with dark brown eyes and hair. She was everything. She was so smart that people from all over the community would call her to ask for advice. While she talked on the phone for hours lying on her bed, I would cuddle up beside her. I pushed my head into her armpit and rested my hand on her stomach.

In my earliest memories, I would follow her around shopping or on errands, clutching the seam of her pants. That was my spot, behind my mama's leg, where I could peek our at new people. She taught me how to read when I was three and at ten told me I could get a PhD if I wanted to. She loved good humour, and my brothers and I would sit in the car on long drives and tell ridiculous stories to hear her laugh. She loved each of us, even though we three were entirely different from one another: one Democrat, one Republican, one Libertarian. She was shy in public and would tell me how much she admired my confidence and easiness with conversation.

We fought, too—big screaming matches—especially when I was a teenager. She would be yelling and crying in her light blue nightgown, crossing the living room toward me with her pain. She could be a crazy woman. I remember once thinking that I would tell her I was going to move out, but the sound got stuck in my throat. I couldn't move away from her. The intensity of our relationship made me feel connected, cared for, alive. In my mother's arms, I was not a tomboy, a queer, or a butch. I was just a kid hungry for her attention, for her approval, and for her love.

When she died a dozen years ago, it became even more important for me to have a baby. Losing my mother has been the biggest tragedy of my life. If I could no longer have a mother, then I needed to become one.

But first, I had to get through a pregnancy.

A butch pregnancy.]

karleen pendelton jiménez, "beautiful creature" from persistence: all ways butch and femme

#karleen pendelton jiménez #currently reading #lesbian lit #butch lit

[alligatorbutch]

[I had a plan when I started high school. I was going to wear girls' clothes. I was going to a new school in a different city, and I thought it was chance to look normal. I would have no history. They wouldn't know that all I wore in junior high were jeans, jerseys, and soccer shorts. It never occurred to me to do otherwise until the day a boy in my science class told me that people thought I was weird for wearing guys' clothes. I wasn't following the rules. I didn't really know they existed. But I could fix that, and no one would have to know.

I had faith in pink sweaters to hide my masculine strut across the playground. I was just as oblivious to the stares of my classmates as I was in my basketball sweats. The other students made bets about what gender I was. The ambiguity was hilarious to them. It wasn't about winning the bet; the entertainment value was derived from debating the issue, making a case based on observable evidence.

I was their joke. Having a butch in class was funny on its own, but a butch trying desperately to look like a girl was hysterical. It was all the more humiliating that I was wearing bright-coloured blouses with ruffled collars in an attempt to appease them. I couldn't protect myself in those clothes. When I came out a few years later, I got rid of feminine attire for good. I finally got to enjoy being attractive as a masculine woman, having women want me for precisely the same queerness that had previously been used against me.

"You're going to have to wear a dress now," my friend laughs, "a big, long matronly dress." The first time I heard this, I chuckled along with the friend or acquaintance who had thought of the image. But then it kept happening. After work, on the phone, at a party, one woman after another kept coming up to me and sharing her vision: Since I was pregnant, I would have to wear a dress. They were only partly kidding, as I had seriously transgressed my role as a butch by getting pregnant, and now it was time for me to pay my dues. For months, they kept urging me to oblige them, "Come on, just once."

I was nervous about the transformation of my butch body into something lush and womanly when I got pregnant, but it hadn't crossed my mind that it would entail wearing a dress. The comments were meant in fun—they weren't pressuring me as a woman to conform to social expectations; I was more like a man in drag on a wild night. Even though I understood their relatively harmless intentions, I could not shake the high school kid in me who had tried so hard to be okay.]

karleen pendelton jiménez, "beautiful creature" from persistence: all ways butch and femme

#karleen pendelton jiménez #currently reading #lesbian lit #butch lit

[alligatorbutch]

[My definition of butch involves chivalry. I want to be courageous, gallant, to show the highest respect for a woman. I think of an idealized knighthood, where such characteristics are valued and groomed. I would protect my lover from an enemy, risk physical harm.

I was nine years old the first time I held another girl. It was nighttime around the campfire, and the counsellors were telling gruesome stories to freak out the kids. The girl beside me—with hazel eyes and long braided hair—asked if I would hold her because she was scared. I had never imagined such a request. My instinct kicked in immediately. I wrapped my arms around her. I ceased being frightened myself because I could only think about how proud I felt to protect her. It didn't matter if I was cold, or if the rock that I was sitting on was hard and uncomfortable. Everything, for an instant and for the first time in my life, felt right. I was a little knight beside the campfire.

I have to admit that there is actually little, in my twenty-first century North American life, that calls for mortal risk. The scary stories, after all, weren't real. My every-day gallantry probably has more to do with enduring minor physical discomfort for the benefit of the person beside me, especially a femme (but only if she wants it). Offering a chair, offering to do an errand or a chore, offering to share my food. Little tokens. That's all. Gifts that make me feel strong, generous, and loving.

If anything, pregnancy was my most courageous act. I endured the burden of growing a whole life underneath my skin. I risked my life to make another. It's the only time I've ever been admitted to a hospital. I listened to my baby's heartbeat rise and then slow, dangerously slow. I panicked. I looked up at the doctor and agreed to have my body cut open for the baby. Without question. I've never been so brave. I've never fulfilled my ideal role of butch with such certainty.]

karleen pendelton jiménez, "beautiful creature" from persistence: all ways butch and femme

#karleen pendelton jiménez #currently reading #lesbian lit #butch lit

[alligatorbutch]

["Why can't you just do with 'Mom' what you do with 'woman'?" Cindy asks me. That is, why can't you ask the world to expand its definition of Mom to include someone who is not feminine. I don't have an answer. "I just can't," is the answer. And yet, it is what I have done. I'm a dad called "Mum."

Which turns some heads. When people see us, they see masculine-presenting adult, feminine-presenting adult, and kid. They assume straightness—and then Kate calls me Mum. One clerk in a convenience store was so shocked he couldn't stop laughing the whole time we paid for our milk. He was nice' it wasn't mean laughter, he was just so freakin' surprised.

When she doesn't call me Mum, we pass. Like last week, a taxi driver in Paris tells us we should really go to gay Pride, the kids love it. He shrugs: Go figure, but hey, what the kids love, that's what you do.

We're always wondering, when do we say something? When do we come out? When do we let it go? People think Kate is a boy too. There's an example being set here. We want to say, "These divisions between boy and girl, man and woman—they're artificial and inadequate and they lead to injustice." We don't want to always think of the world in gendered terms. And yet, to be butch and femme is to be gendered, which seem important to shake up once in a while, regularly. Frankly, I get a little lost thinking about it.

Funny thing is I now have a kid who is gender non-conforming. So I get to be completely not my mom and say, "What do you want to wear?" "Hair cut? Sure. Let's go."]

anne fleming, "a dad called mum" from persistence: all ways butch and femme

#anne fleming #currently reading

[alligatorbutch]

[It was almost a year before I talked to anyone other than my first girlfriend about gender. We'd actually just broken up when I met S—who I affectionately referred to as my gender friend—at a conference in Massachusetts. S and I were walking through the lobby after a few beers at the hotel bar when the conversation turned to shopping. We bonded over the difficulty of finding clothing to fit our frames—short and on the chubby side—when we wanted to wear mostly men's clothes.

That conference was an exhilarating weekend of bits and pieces of gender conversation, something I was starved for after hesitantly coming out as genderqueer to my girlfriend only a year before. When the weekend was over, S gave me a business card with her contact info and a note scribbled on the back: Don't forget to share outfits through the mail. I need more faggy butches in my life.

Faggy butch was good. It accurately described by pink button-down shirts, my giggles, the fact that I talk with my hands. I once saw a tape of myself in which I made a gesture like looked more like it belonged in A Chorus Line than in the middle of an interview. Faggy butch was like genderqueer—not quite this or that, a little of both, maybe. A friend once said to me, "I access my femininity through my masculinity."

I feel lucky to have grown up in a world with butch pioneers, and I feel lucky that I had an idea about what being butch might have meant. But instead of making me feel part of the community, these constructions of what butch was—stereotypes, really—pushed me away from the word and the identity. Instead, I chose a newer term, genderqueer, which had yet to be defined; it was in flux, it was a new frontier. I may not have been butch "enough," but genderqueer was mine to rewrite and redefine.

I still like the word "genderqueer," still claim it and own it and love the way it makes room for me, in all my complexities. But I'm coming back around to butch. Maybe it's because the years of pink prom dresses are further and further behind me, maybe it's because I'm learning from butch elders who talk in terms that make room for me, giggles and all. Maybe it's also because the people I know have no idea (unless I tell them) that I was never a tomboy. They only know me—my short hair, tightly bounded chest, and button-down shirts.

I think every new generations feels the need to reject their elders, reject what came before them, and feel that they are the new gender rebels. We invent terms, we create new spaces, and sometimes, we come back to where our big brothers started—home.]

miriam zoila pérez, "coming back around to butch" from persistence: all ways butch and femme

#miriam zoila pérez #currently reading

[alligatorbutch]

[I was barely a dyke then, let alone butch, but it was the lure of female masculinity that drew me out and into the queer world.

When I was coming out, butch was no longer new. There was both popular knowledge and an underground cultural understanding of what it meant to be butch—and there were books written from both perspectives. I may not have known it intimately, as a late-blooming queer who grew up in an extremely straight southern-US town, but I knew enough to feel self-conscious about claiming butchness.

You see, I was never a tomboy. There, I said it. I was never a goddamn tomboy; I never resisted the dresses my mom wanted me to wear, never hid in my dad's closet trying on his clothes. I did gender conformity without any real fight, and when I came out to my mom, she used it against me—"But you were always so feminine!"

Maybe I didn't have the fight in me, maybe I wanted to fit in more than I wanted to know myself, but until I was well past twenty, I wore my hair long, with earrings dangling, and makeup on my face. I wore spaghetti-strap tank tops and flowing skirts. I flaunted my cleavage.

The butch narrative I had absorbed, the one I began to furtively read about as I came out, wasn't mine. I wasn't a rough-and-tumble butch kid, all scabby knees and hardness, fighting against mom over Sunday dresses. I wasn't good at sports, didn't have trouble being friends with girls, didn't feel more "boy" than "girl." So when I slowly started easing toward the masculine side of the spectrum, I was self-conscious as fell. I felt like an imposter. I felt like a phony. I had similar feelings when I came out as a lesbian, but my fantasies about women quickly assuaged my fears of being a queer fraud.

With my gender presentation, I couldn't get over the feeling that I was trying too hard. Even as I slowly shed the layers of femininity in my presentation, the self-consciousness still affected what labels I used. I knew what butch was, and I still felt it couldn't be me. I had dated men. I wore a pink dress to prom. I was short and chubby and more giggly than tough.

It was a fierce femme who bossy-bottomed me into the role of butch top. It was easy to be the butch to C's femme, and she delighted in my enjoyment of her high heels, pretty dresses, and makeup. In those moments, when my insecurity was stronger than my sense of self, the contrast between my budding masculinity and her strong, well-articulated femininity was just what I needed to feel whole, strong, even butch. C didn't change me, exactly, but our gender-play heavy sex gave me room to figure out what my gender could look like in those private spaces we shared.

There are people who believe you can't be butch without a femme, that you need two ends of the spectrum all the time to be in balance. For me, that was only half-true. I did need the strength of my lover's femininity to bring me into my own identity. I did need the contrast with her to let me see myself. But now that I'm there, I haven't forgotten the tomboys I had crushes on in the early days. I still fantasize about fucking them—but now, not exactly as a girl. I needed my own sense of gender first so that I could come back to them.]

miriam zoila pérez, "coming back around to butch" from persistence: all ways butch and femme

#miriam zoila pérez #currently reading #lesbian lit #butch lit #trans lit

[alligatorbutch]

reminder that gender cant be tidied up into some distinctive "men" and "non-men" binary. you are not truly accepting genderqueer people when you use this sort of categorical framing. bigender people exist. genderfluid people exist. nonbinary people who dont even Know if they fall under "man" or "non-man" exists. and various other sorts of gender identities. by defining lesbian as exclusively "non-men" you are ostracizing so many genderqueer people.

[alligatorbutch]

[On the punishment side of the coin, there's a deep shame involved in any failure to pass. As I was preparing the final draft of this book, someone I know only peripherally came over to my house on an errand—he was with an ex-lover of mine. In casual conversation, he slipped on a pronoun and referred to me as "he."

Let me tell you what happened, the way it looked from inside my head. The world slowed down, like it does in the movies when someone is getting shot and the filmmaker wants you to feel every bullet enter your body. The words echoed in my ears over and over. Attached to that simple pronoun was the word failure, quickly followed by the word freak. All the joy sucked out of my life in that instant, and every moment I'd ever fucked up crashed down on my head. Here was someone who'd never known me as a man, referring to me as a man. Instead of saying or doing anything, I shut down and was polite to him for the rest of the time he was in my house.

Now here's a telling point: all three of us (as I later found out) were aware of that slip, and none of us said anything. He's a trained sex worker, with a great deal of experience working with sexual and gender minorities. She had two transsexual lovers, me having been one of them. I'm a transsexual. We all knew he'd slipped on a pronoun, and none of us said anything—not a giggle, not an "oops," not one comment. Each of us was far too embarrassed to say anything 'til the next day. What does that say about the gender imperative? I think it says everything.]

kate bornstein, gender outlaw: on men, women, and the rest of us

#kate bornstein #currently reading #lesbian lit #trans lit

[alligatorbutch]

Octavia Butler’s list of concepts that are sexy, via LA Review.

#octavia butler

[alligatorbutch]

["She is my only pinup. I joke about making a calendar, six months of her in a binder and boxer briefs in different colors, three months in a sports bra and jeans, three months in a shirt and tie, maybe a sweater vest for variety.

When we watch movies, she watches the men, their clothes, their hair, their bodies. Walking down the street, she'll grab my arm. "He's so tall!" "Did you see his jacket?" I turn my head, but the object of this admiration, envy or wonder is halfway down the block. "I didn't notice," I mumble. If anything, I notice women, their colors, their accessories, their posture.

In the country of men, she is a foreign exchange student with a visa and I don't even have a passport. She is writing a doctoral thesis and I don't speak the language. I never needed to, never wanted to. I am an admirer of masculinity. I don't need to embody it.

She is my only pinup, my butch and my top. Her desire to fuck me is an electrical current that charges and changes us both. I don't need to fuck her in the same way. I don't have that energy coursing through me that makes me want to take her, own her.

When I fuck her it's sweet, silly, gentle, so different from how she tops me, with that scary look that melts me, makes me arch my back and throw my hands up over my head.

The first time she let me touch her chest, it was morning. She asked me to look away while she took off her binder, then crawled under the sheet, pulled it up to her chin like a child afraid of monsters who will snatch anything left uncovered. She let me touch her back. The freckles behind her ears, and she said, coy like a femme, "I have freckles on my back, too." I kissed the bone ridges of her spine, the sheet still pulled up to her waist. We rolled over together, skin to skin like some mad ballet, and there is nothing, nothing, like chests and nipples touching. Especially when I had wondered if it would ever happen.

We'd talked about someday, talked about how she dreamed of lying topless on the beach, but I thought it would be months, years, before she'd let me touch her chest. I would stroke her belly while we cuddled and sometimes she asked me to massage under the elastic band of her sports bra where her skin was sore and constricted. Gradually, we were getting closer to something we both knew we wanted. Later, I joked it only took me six months to get to second base.

After that day she gradually grew more comfortable. Soon she had a new pinup pose, on her back, chest bare with her hands behind her head, grinning at me."]

Gigi Frost, from Only Pinup, from Me And My Boi: Queer Erotic Strategies, edited by Sachi Green, Cleis Press, 2016

#whew #gigi frost #lesbian lit #butch lit #trans lit

[alligatorbutch]

[There is great work being made all the time. Find it where you find it. If it moves you, give thanks for being open enough to be moved, give thanks for being able to shake before your favourite band. This is the start. Hold on to it.]

kae tempest, on connection

#kae tempest #currently reading #lesbian lit

[alligatorbutch]

[Precision. Focus. Dedication to a craft, to a practice, that reaches for more than an expression of individuality. Reaching beyond the self is the self is the self is the look at my self, have you seen how unlike all other selves my self is? More. Stand in a crowd and hear music. Sit in a chair and watch a body cross a space. Feel shake to the core by something un-numb that lives in the depths of all transactions based on LOVE. The passionate declaration of, "I have seen. I have heard. I have felt. And it's for you that I am moved to speak. To sing. To dance here this way. I want to express more than myself. I want to express something about US." And for a moment the numbness is wrenched away from you, because they're singing my life up there! That's my despair, my hope is in those drums! And I exist as more than an agent of my own individualism. An avatar, competing.

Connection balances numbness. Connection is the first step towards any act of acknowledgement, accountability or responsibility. It offers, whether fleeting or long-lasting, a closeness to all others. It is jubilant. Ecstatic. Without fear.]

kae tempest, on connection

#kae tempest #currently reading #lesbian lit

[alligatorbutch]

[My voice was not only my livelihood, it was also how I asserted myself in a room. My pass. The one thing about me, as I saw it at the time, that made it okay for me to exist in public, considering all the things that I was—dyke, fat, bloke, unfemale, unmale, anxious, full of dysphoric shame and discomfort, painfully shy and simultaneously overbearing in social situations or around people I didn't know. My voice and my lyricism gave me an escape route from my body and from the way being trapped in that body made me act and feel. My voice was my ticket to existence. And I'd lost it. There was no guarantee that after the surgery it would come back. And if it did, there was no guarantee that it would sound like me. They clamped my mouth open with a brace and knocked me out with anaesthetic.

I was forced to silence. Forced to choose my words carefully, having to write down anything I wanted to say. I learned to sit in a room and listen to my friends and family without trying to think of funny or interesting things to contribute; I learned to sit and be silent with people. To listen until someone had finished expressing their thought entirely, and beyond that, until they would reveal themselves to me in ways they never had before. Those with greater wisdom than me have the skill and self-assurance to listen like this without needing to be forced, but I was so obviously in need in humbling. And the universe provided.]

kae tempest, on connection

#kae tempest #currently reading #lesbian lit

[alligatorbutch]

["Finishing" work is what gives the artist the humility necessary to begin again. Many, many people have ideas. But to go through the agony of finishing that idea, realising your are so ill-equipped that, despite your burning conviction, your deep creativity, your relentless practice and your natural talent, you have still failed. You made a good go of it. The thing is out there, another step towards meaning. Next time, maybe you'll do it better. Or maybe you'll never do it again.

This is the reality of an artist's experience, and is what gives the artist the awe and respectfulness that is the mark of a good one. Even consumed with purpose, convinced that what they have to say is going to be important for the world, even then, with all that noble fire to create, it is still a process of failing. A process of persevering despite the failures and raising a quiet pride in the ability to keep failing, and hopefully, as Beckett would have it, fail better.

The difference between an artist and someone who dreams of becoming an artist is finished work. The person with the great ideas that judges other people's output as inferior to what they themselves could produce, but has never actually committed themselves to producing anything in full; this is the fallacy of artistic endeavour. Everyone is so sure they can do it, apart from the people who actually do it, who despite knowing that they must, are more sure every time that they can't.]

kae tempest, on connection

#kae tempest #currently reading #lesbian lit