The third word is ally.
Three months ago I did not know who Kate Bornstein was. Despite what I write here about gender, power, culture, and the like, I have no academic background (or self-educational background) in sociology or gender theory.
So I didn’t know the woman I met at Pleasure Salon all those weeks ago, the woman I bugged for a class description and biography, was famous. But I read her class description when it came, and then people started mentioning her name with that little hitch of awe, and then I started getting excited. And then I realized she was a writer, and that everyone I knew seemed to know her name, and I grew into an awareness of how much I wanted to see her speak. And of how silly I was being, and how awkward I felt, because let’s face it, even if you meet me for the first time and think I’m charming, outgoing, or sweet, the reality is I’m awkward as hell, I dread meeting new people, and I’m simply a very, very good actor.
So when I started plotting my Sunday morning around her class, my thoughts swung between It’ll be crowded and I probably won’t even get to say hello and Christ, woman. You’re going to make a fool of yourself.
And I did make a fool of myself. But of course, it was all right.
I’ve written before about how we, as scene member or simply fellow humans, form tight-knit groups, often around common interests or experience. The groups I frequent are more often than not characterized by being deliberately academic and/or consciously fluid. And such is Kate.
So when I sat down in her class, Survival Tips For Sex and Gender Outlaws, I did not know what to expect. The class was small, ten, maybe twelve of us who’d gotten out of bed early and made it to that space. She got out a big pad of white paper and began drawing Venn diagrams. The intersection of identity, desire, and power.
She talked about oppression and “isms” and politics. She has this remarkable gift of performance; she’s brilliant, and her words resonate. It’s a shock to hear someone say out loud the ideas you haven’t learned to articulate. I won’t regurgitate her research here; go read her books if you’re interested. It’s great stuff.
Then, as the group began to open up, to share experiences and talk, the conversation shifted. She talked about suicide. Her book is subtitled “101 Alternatives To Suicide,” and she talked about compiling that list, throwing in everything she could think of that would encourage people to stay alive. Illegal things, stupid things. The camaraderie in the room built up, threaded through the conversation.
We understand. We went through this. We’re with you, Kate. We struggled too.
And very, very quietly, I started to cry.
I didn’t have that experience. I’m sorry, but if you’re expecting me to eventually, after I’ve been writing here for a while, come out and talk about all the horrible trauma of my childhood years with maybe something touching and dramatic thrown in about kitchen knives or pills, you will be disappointed. Once, in the very young stages of our relationship, May turned to me and said “You’re the only emotionally smart person I know who’s actually healthy.”
I did not have an abusive childhood. I did not overcome a disease. I did not question my gender. I did not have a struggle which forced me to think. I did not attempt to reject my identity. I did not have a difficult time coming out. I had a difficult time growing up, but really, I was, and am, lucky. Overwhelmingly lucky.
And then sometimes, maybe a handful of times, people have seen me hugging May and sneered. God, I hate straight people. Or closed me out with their shoulders when I walk around in makeup and trendy clothes. I can’t stand these vanilla tourists. I can walk down the street and not get a second glance; I can work a corporate job, and get into bars on weekends. I can find partners, and be loved, and have orgasms and sex.
Apparently my luck shines through, and it makes my life look easy.
So this feeling, of having no right in a world where right is gained through suffering, this is a feeling I know very well.
Familiar as I am with being a crazy overthinking crazy person, eventually I calmed myself down. I did some breathing techniques. She continued to speak, drawing on our sense of community and mutual support. Of being allies. And I figured that she, if anyone, could handle this question. So I raised my hand.
“Could you give some ideas on-” and then I started crying again. The minute I open my mouth every time, damnit. Only this time I was really crying. May put his arms around me, Blaise reached back and hugged my knee with his hand. I held up my fingers and took a deep breath while everyone watched me. I laughed and cried at the same time; laughing because I felt so silly and crying because the words were hard.
I got it out eventually. “Could you give some ideas about supporting or being part of a fluid community when you identify with one pole of that community?” And I thought to myself, Well, fuck, that made no sense at all.
Except I watched her process the words, and I watched her understand. “Ohhh,” she said, drawing air in through rounded lips. May hugged me harder.
If you ever meet Kate, you will notice that she has amazing eyes. They are warm; they can make you feel toasty with just a glance. She fixed those amazing eyes on mine. “You have every right to this community, honey. This is your space too.” Other people murmured around me. I gave up on trying not to cry.
After the class was over, my friends started turning around to hug me. “I was getting teary too,” May said in my ear. “So were we!” cried Jen, her arm around Tyler’s waist. Blaise just grinned.
Natasha and Barbara came up and hugged me. Then Kate was kneeling by my chair.
She pulled me in me tight and spoke into my ear. “You are fluid, you know. You tell anyone who gives you shit that Kate Bornstein will come and beat them up. You tell them I said that.” I started laughing helplessly. She gives good hugs.
When the doors to the classroom opened and the rest of the convention started mixing back in, I walked with ragged steps. Tyler, Jen, May and I made a little cluster just outside the door. I had finally stopped sniffling.
Tyler had her big smile on. “I feel like we all just had an emotional orgasm,” she said.
I threw my head back. “Ha! Yes!”
And running through my head, over and over, was the word ally. That’s what I felt like. That’s what I am.
One thing Kate said during the class is still with me clearly, although much of the class itself has sunk in the haze of that emotional orgasm. She gestured at the room, the twelve of us up close in plastic chairs. “In here, this is my family.” She raised her hands to indicate the rest of the convention center, the 700-odd people running through that kinky space. “Out there, that’s my tribe.”
11 Comments
Ally is a good word.
I don’t have much to say actually, but I did want to say:
of having no right in a world where right is gained through suffering
Yeah. I get that too. Never had major angst about my gender or sexuality or whatever (a little early-20s stuff about whether I “counted” as bi, that’s about it). And whilst I have strong opinions about not treating gender as necessarily binary, &c &c, my own is pretty solidly female.
So it’s good to read this & to be reminded that that’s all OK too. Thank you.
I had not heard of Kate Bornstein before, and I’m very pleased to have learned about her now – thank you!
Suicide is a topic very close to the heart for me (my mother killed herself), so seeing it addressed in the way she does is very heartening for me.
xx Dee
Juliet-
I’m glad that you read this post and picked out that one line. I feel like that doesn’t get said a lot, so it’s nice to know it connects with other people.
Dee-
I’m glad to reference you to her! I hope you enjoy more of her work as you get the chance; she really is brilliant. Please let me know or write about your thoughts on her topics when you get the chance.
“I’m glad that you read this post and picked out that one line. I feel like that doesn’t get said a lot, so it’s nice to know it connects with other people.“
As the poster child for emotional angst, I want to second the notion that it’s nice to hear that line connecting with other people. Makes me think that perhaps the world’s not quite so bad a place for everyone after all, which is encouraging in a way.
Naturally, it also bears saying that the fact that people think rights are gained through suffering is a completely fucked up idea to begin with and only makes people more eager to get themselves all sorts of fucked up and be okay with being fucked up which is so fucking fucked up I can’t even fucking say fuck enough times to express how fucked up it all is. Augh!
Thanks for introducing Kate Bornstein. I read the Amazon reviews of her books, and she seems a fascinating Lady. Otherwise, your post made me think of Larry Craig, and I was wondering if he was “one of us” too. When the story came up, I must admit I jubilated. The hypocrisy uncovered was just too good. Upon reflection though, my mood has soured a bit. I feel outraged at the idea of law enforcement busting someone for what seems like no crime at all to me (okay, the peeping was creepy, but we’re guys, we can take it). I also feel sad for him. The guy, with is staunch anti-gay positions, has caused a lot of harm to a lot of people, but what kind of pressure can cause a man like him to take such huge risks to his career, family and reputation? Part of me thinks that maybe he wanted to be busted, or something. I don’t know… What do you think?
Hiya, spellbound.
What do I think happened to him? I have no idea what his internal motivations or beliefs were. His story has been so blown up that the actual facts of what happened (i.e. what he was arrested for) have been pretty much ignored. Although it looks like what he was busted for clearly indicated a criminal intent to the officer who arrested him, the story itself has obviously become about the larger implications.
I wrote a while back that kink is naturally inclusive, in that you print your own membership card, so to speak. The same could be said to be true for all sexualitites. In this particular case, Mr. Craig clearly doesn’t want to be a member. So, do I think he’s gay, or wanted to be busted, or gets off on sex in bathrooms? I don’t give a shit, to be honest. I just want him to stop calling other memberships wrong.
I think it’s a damned shame that the man lost his position and appears to have destroyed his career over an alleged identity. But that’s because I think it’s a damned shame that we live in a contry where your sexual identity can endanger your job. And where your sexual identity is pretty much a necessarily political part of your life.
I’m wary to hold Mr. Craig up as a poster child for the “Ohmigod look what happens when you criminalize alt sex and have to deal with the repression, you big fat liars” way of thinking. For one, he’ll continue to deny it, so this becomes nothing more than gossip. And for two, I think this is a crap way to change people’s opinions about sex.
Everyone else always comments about the greater idea of your posts, but me, I can’t ever seem to get past the content.
Once again, I want to say thanks for writing exactly the words I wanted to. At first I thought, I better write what I want to write, my own experience of it, before reading someone else’s and forgetting which memories are actually mine. Then I realized from reading your posts that so many of the thoughts you had were the thoughts I had, because of where my brain happened to be and who it was focused on.
The other thing is maybe that the weekend was such a dream for me that everything seemed to have its perfect poetic place. I mean, it wrote itself like a brilliant piece of fiction, and maybe that’s why it was so great. I love that you wrote it and that I can be a spectator to it all over again, in all of these installments.
Yay. Happiness. And to think it was only a week ago.
Naturally, it also bears saying that the fact that people think rights are gained through suffering is a completely fucked up idea to begin with…
A couple of years ago I was involved with two people who were both, in slightly different ways, very fucked up. I started to feel that there was something wrong with me because, y’know, there wasn’t something wrong with me… Both of them were at pains to overtly reassure me that this wasn’t the case, but in practice it meant that they got to have the angst & have their stuff be More Important Because Of The Fucked Up, & I got to do the supportive thing, pretty much full-time. Argh.
Can we say “all of the fucked up?”. Yes, we can, probably several times. It really was “fucked up = rights”, in spades. Not good.
I think you could probably say “fuck” a few more times, there, May. I might join in ;)
Juliet:
I have always been in the rare circumstance of being able to actually cross the bridge and relate to people on both sides. (This is actually a motif I should maybe write about. It shows up in my sexuality and my education and my mental illness and many other parts of my life, as well.) I have had what very many people would consider to be a very fucked up childhood (and life in general, I guess), but I also am friends with people whom I consider to have much more fucked up lives than me. I couldn’t even count the number of sexual abuse victims I’ve befriended and had friendships with over the years. I’ve been the last person someone talked to before that person took a gun to her head. So, y’know, all things considered I’m very much the middle ground. Being the middle ground is weird that way, the being on both sides of the bridge way.
I guess this whole thing is just preface to the simple point that people very often and completely wrongly compare emotional angst based on arbitrary measures of fucked-upness, when in fact comparing one person’s emotional angst to another’s this way is itself fucked up.
And I’m amazed it takes someone so entrenched in the middle ground, or so experienced with both euphoria and depression depending on your point of view, to make that plainly obvious.
Aaaand, now i’m getting teary.
“of having no right in a world where right is gained through suffering”
Thank you for saying all this, again. I feel double-schmucky, because I wan’t even AT the meeting to be hugged by Kate Borenstein and told that I’m officially a friend to the genderqueer. The other night at Summer CV I noticed that I used the word (prefix? neologism-prefix?) “het” as a semi-pejorative about myself, to Blaise, and rolled my eyes a bunch. Because I want in on the club, i somehow feel like i need to prove that I’m on the Happy Sloppy Kisses team, even though I’ve only kissed one lady (spectacularly!!)
True to form, that senetnce went 10 places. Still with me?
What is it with me and authority, that i feel like I need a certificate of authenticity from someone who is essentially an iconoclast?
I totally hear you on somehow feeling guilty/deprived because my early life lacked dire struggle. Poor little me, right? And yet I AM jealous of people with thick skins and an unwillingness to take the bullshit of others. Hoo.
Maja-
I don’t think you need to use “het” as a pejorative. It’s just another place on the scale. Also, I don’t think this is an exclusive club. I think it’s just a state of mind.
You did kiss that lady spectacularly. But even if you hadn’t, or never did again, you’d still be my friend. Y’know, I’m just sayin’. And I’d want to hear what you have to say.
Blaise and I still laugh over how long it took us to be friends, because I was convinced he was too cool for me. Shows what I know :).
One Trackback/Pingback
[...] isn’t cool these days, much in the same way Maja once used “het,” hilariously, as a neo-semi-pejorative. That seems a bit unfair to me. Vanilla is unfortunately conflated with sex-negativity in a way [...]
Post a Comment