Confessions of an Uneducated Queer
I don’t really understand Judith Butler.
I once tried to reference “Fucult”
at a party to make myself sound smart
and my friend politely corrected me and said it’s pronounced Foo-Coe. The only reason I have tried to read either of them is that my house-mates who went to college left their books at my house.
As a teenager, I sensed sexuality was a spectrum I didn’t have all the words for.
In my twenties, I was called a slut for
being attracted to so many points on the spectrum. For years, I operated under three beliefs, gifted to me by lovers:
1. I don’t get to be gay.
2. There is no such thing as bisexual.
3. I am the “straightest” woman on the planet.
I’m not sure I have listened to an entire Teagan and Sara song. I’ve only seen one season of the L-Word. I had sex with at least
3 women before I was able to call it “sex.”
The only thing they teach you less about in school than how to make sense of your own body is how to support others in theirs. Something the poet, Tara Hardy taught me
is called allyship. I first heard the term
binding in an Andrea Gibson workshop on gender. When Rae talked about the difference in how he was treated when binding his chest. Rae dated my sister in the initial stages
of his transition. My sister and I stumbled all over the pronouns and terms. We weren’t sure if Rae was a transexual girl or a transgender boy. Finally, the poet, Dane Kuttler, sat us
down in an ice cream shop in Seattle and said,
“Babies. It’s time for Trans 101.”
That class cost me $4.50 and a half-hour of my friend’s patience.
I first heard the word, cisgender when the poet, Sam Sax and his boyfriend, escorted me and my girlfriend, to the most famous
lesbian bar in San Francisco and when we left he said, “Wow, they don’t usually like it when cis-dudes hang out in there.” I was embarrassed to ask what he meant but when he said that he identified with the gender assigned to him at birth, I felt a sudden
wave of comfort wash over me, in the acknowledgment of my own privilege.
$12 in whisky sodas and a loving bearded smirk.
Which led me to learn the term, passing privilege when I was dating a woman I worked with at the State Capitol and I was scared to kiss her in the hallway, with her short hair and fancy suit, until the poet, Denise Jolly, said,
“Lauren, it’s not fair for you to let her take all the shit. Getting to conveniently be straight doesn’t help anyone.” $3 in cheesy grits and my friend gently and unapologetically telling me about myself.
Everything I know about being a good queer, I learned from poets. Poets are cheaper than college. But we do not all get to travel around the country and get schooled by poets. We do not all have access to the most helpful words. I was afraid to write this because I didn’t want to fuck it up.
Writing poems about things you don’t know a lot about can be very problematic.
But not writing poems because you are afraid to fuck it up can also be problematic. The world is problematic. Please fuck it up.
This is for the first time I heard the term heteronormative and felt like I was handed a corkscrew after years of opening the bottle with my teeth.
This is for the dyke at the gas company who had no idea who Ani DiFranco was. This is for not identifying as bisexual but paying respects to everyone who fought to keep the B in LGBT. This is for the Q. For the Q. For the I. For the A.
What’s that spell?, HEYYYY.
I hope someday we string so many letters we form a glorious word that takes all of our mouths to pronounce. This is for my mom who can never get my love’s pronouns right. Who doesn’t get the gender stuff but bought me every Rita Mae Brown book so I could be “a good lesbian.”
This is for the friend who told me I needed to read Stone Butch Blues before they could have another conversation with me.
This is for learning how to carry the word Femme and then dropping the whole tray on the hard tile.
This is for trying on new words. Dusty attic words. Slick spoons words. Fuck-up-everyone’s-shit-and-look-good-doing-it-words.
This is for the straight girls who still have to get drunk to kiss other girls.
I get it.
Oppression is a loud room,
sometimes we can’t hear our own pulse.
For my daughter who stood up to the kids who called her friend gay,
“Mom, they said it like it was a bad thing.”
This is for my best friend in high school, Luther Pegues who was so convinced he was going to hell he fashioned his life into a loaded pistol.
Luther, if you are still alive, please find me. I wish I’d had all the smart words back then.
For my sister Kait, who bravely came out at 13 to my family who said, ‘Of course. We know. We are so glad you do too.”
This is for my radical homies, who learn everything from zines and free
books at the infoshop.
For the suburban queerfolk who only have Tumblr to not feel alone in the
world.
For every Jerre Fine joining the military to get to be gay. Learning all the gay music so he could have a code to speak in. For survival.
For all those who survived under DADT. For those who still wish they had it as a shield for
protection.
For every Bethann sneaking each Wednesday to the bookstore in the next town to read everything in the two-foot LGBT section before going to her bible study. For the folks who can’t read but still subvert the dominant
paradigm on the daily.
And for Rae,
who listened to the first draft of this poem and wanted to not have a problem with it because he wanted to make peace with his past life. Whose father called him on the phone today and said “You don’t come from a family of
faggots.”
This is for all of us, scraping the binary from our softest parts. And being gentle with each other as we
fuck
it
all
up.
For the fancy educated Queer Theorists.
Thank you.