Sunday, June 29, 2008
femme conference!
pride. le sigh.
i feel like a bad queer today. pride has come and gone and i did *nothing* to celebrate. in fact, i spent my saturday night with my queer-friendly straight friends playing rock band until the wee hours of the morning. i finally got to screech celebrity skin into a microphone with my friends on various back-up instruments. it was super sweet.
i don't know why i can't get behind pride anymore. i could say it's the commercialization of it, which it is somewhat. being in minneapolis during pride, the city that houses the headquarters of target, it's a little bit vomitous to see homos walking around with temporary rainbow tattoos with big target emblems in the middle. but that's not it entirely. my friends all went out last night, had a big gay time, and i'm sure i would've had a blast if i was with them. i just couldn't bring myself to do it though.
maybe it's the way that pride turns into a binge drinking fest, which i have no issue with necessarily except for when it's binge drinking done by a bunch of frat boy dykes with visors that make me want diiiiiieeee. popped collars, polo sport, and the who-has-a-better-6-pack contest amongst them is just so not appealing.
maybe i'm too old for this. but i'm only 26. should i really be this over it? i blame college. four years at a women's college where all we did was drink and buy into this gross fetishistic culture of talking about tits and bacardi 151. i wasn't even butch then or sporty or whatever...i was femme, but not out as femme because there wasn't any kind of space for that there. four years worth of all that grimey, sweaty, woo-hoo "pride" shit that has made me feel sour about it since.
but don't get me wrong either. i've been to prides all over the place, in various cities, since college and have enjoyed myself. nyc pride is fantastic and there's no way to not have fun there, whereas d.c. was just plain ol' underwhelming. i don't know what it is, but even my fonder memories of summers spent partying in the streets with a bunch of queers, covered in rainbows, and drinking margaritas smuggled in in nalgene bottles can't get me amped about it now.
i guess what makes me feel guilty, when i really think about it, is that as a femme, i recognize that i get away with a lot. i walk down the street and what i get noticed for or heckled for is almost never my gender or perceived sexuality. i'm read as a straight girl unless i'm arm-in-arm with some handsome boi type. and so i know that, in the spirit of pride which, lest we forget with all that beer and all of those tits, that what we're celebrating when we do pride is that queers exist and that we can organize and form mass and can be political and powerful. this is, after all, our remembering of stonewall, right? so i feel this obligation as someone who passes as straight 99% of the time to stand-up and state my queerness and my desire and to challenge people's assumptions that yes, queer can come in a body that wears red lipstick and dresses. here i am, come and count me. but even with all that on my mind, i couldn't get myself to the parade, to the various marches (including the trans march, which is way smaller, not commercialized, and struggles with visibility every year), or even to the afterparty at our local queer watering hole.
i want to be excited about pride again or maybe not even "pride" but just queerness in general. i want to take it back from its sponsors and i want it to feel inclusive and fun and political. i want margaritas and middle-of-the-street dance parties, and making out at random, but i want powerful protest signs and memory behind that too. acknowledgment of a history of queers that kind of gets lost somehwere for me in all that is "pride" currently.
i don't know why i can't get behind pride anymore. i could say it's the commercialization of it, which it is somewhat. being in minneapolis during pride, the city that houses the headquarters of target, it's a little bit vomitous to see homos walking around with temporary rainbow tattoos with big target emblems in the middle. but that's not it entirely. my friends all went out last night, had a big gay time, and i'm sure i would've had a blast if i was with them. i just couldn't bring myself to do it though.
maybe it's the way that pride turns into a binge drinking fest, which i have no issue with necessarily except for when it's binge drinking done by a bunch of frat boy dykes with visors that make me want diiiiiieeee. popped collars, polo sport, and the who-has-a-better-6-pack contest amongst them is just so not appealing.
maybe i'm too old for this. but i'm only 26. should i really be this over it? i blame college. four years at a women's college where all we did was drink and buy into this gross fetishistic culture of talking about tits and bacardi 151. i wasn't even butch then or sporty or whatever...i was femme, but not out as femme because there wasn't any kind of space for that there. four years worth of all that grimey, sweaty, woo-hoo "pride" shit that has made me feel sour about it since.
but don't get me wrong either. i've been to prides all over the place, in various cities, since college and have enjoyed myself. nyc pride is fantastic and there's no way to not have fun there, whereas d.c. was just plain ol' underwhelming. i don't know what it is, but even my fonder memories of summers spent partying in the streets with a bunch of queers, covered in rainbows, and drinking margaritas smuggled in in nalgene bottles can't get me amped about it now.
i guess what makes me feel guilty, when i really think about it, is that as a femme, i recognize that i get away with a lot. i walk down the street and what i get noticed for or heckled for is almost never my gender or perceived sexuality. i'm read as a straight girl unless i'm arm-in-arm with some handsome boi type. and so i know that, in the spirit of pride which, lest we forget with all that beer and all of those tits, that what we're celebrating when we do pride is that queers exist and that we can organize and form mass and can be political and powerful. this is, after all, our remembering of stonewall, right? so i feel this obligation as someone who passes as straight 99% of the time to stand-up and state my queerness and my desire and to challenge people's assumptions that yes, queer can come in a body that wears red lipstick and dresses. here i am, come and count me. but even with all that on my mind, i couldn't get myself to the parade, to the various marches (including the trans march, which is way smaller, not commercialized, and struggles with visibility every year), or even to the afterparty at our local queer watering hole.
i want to be excited about pride again or maybe not even "pride" but just queerness in general. i want to take it back from its sponsors and i want it to feel inclusive and fun and political. i want margaritas and middle-of-the-street dance parties, and making out at random, but i want powerful protest signs and memory behind that too. acknowledgment of a history of queers that kind of gets lost somehwere for me in all that is "pride" currently.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
did she really do that?
i've been busy spending my days since getting back from vacation endlessly visiting the apple website as i make and remake my new dream computer, as well as working on a conference paper for this big schmoozy national meow meow academic conference i'm leaving for tomorrow. at least they're showing the film "female to femme" by kami chisolm, which i'm totally amped about seeing. i've heard a lot of praise and a few seemingly viable criticisms, so i'll report back more on that later and let you know where i throw my hat on that debate.
in the meantime, i just wanted to post quickly about the absolute hilarity that is life sometimes. my most recent, serious ex (i.e. love-of-my-life, broke-my-hearts-to-bits ex) has resurfaced over the past several weeks. we stopped talking in november and i instituted one of those "don't contact me again, you ruined my life" policies. she didn't really abide by it. tried to contact me in february with no response from me and then sprung up again right before i left on my trip. it's a bad idea for us to talk. ever. i resent her for 100 reasons, she's perpetually unsatisfied with life and whoever she's dating, i'm over feeling like someone who just fills time for her, etc.
anyway, it was a struggle the past few weeks deciding what i wanted to do. had i moved on enough emotionally to let her in a bit or see what she had to say? should i just stay the course and run away faster than i ever had before? i was undecided. somehow, i managed to do both with the end result being a reinstitution of a new and improved "don't contact me again, you ruined my life, you arrogant butch fuck" policy. hopefully she'll stick to it this time, though who can say?
...and then today, because the internet is amazing and because sometimes after a bunch of lemons life actually just hands you lemonade in a tall, chilled glass... [insert dramatic pause]... i found out she got a cat and named him after me.
ok, so not exactly after me. i mean, we don't share the same first and/or last name, but she named him the stupid, cute nickname we used to call one another when we'd get grossed out over how "made for each other" we were. is that fucking precious or what? if this was 6 months ago, 4 months even, i'd feel sad or sentimental or some other nonsense, but at this point, it's just comical. and incredibly just and vindicating. mostly, though, just hilarious. i mean, can you think of a better, more ridiculous foray into an anecdote about dyke drama only to say, "...so she named her cat after me..."?! i challenge you all to post any stories of the like. come on, i need something to keep me laughing while i'm being all studious in a terribly unappealing, midwestern* city!
* this is not to hate on the midwest generally. after all, i do live in the midwest. just the particular city i'm going to is hardly somewhere to be stoked over. so yeah, tell me funny things, no? xo!
in the meantime, i just wanted to post quickly about the absolute hilarity that is life sometimes. my most recent, serious ex (i.e. love-of-my-life, broke-my-hearts-to-bits ex) has resurfaced over the past several weeks. we stopped talking in november and i instituted one of those "don't contact me again, you ruined my life" policies. she didn't really abide by it. tried to contact me in february with no response from me and then sprung up again right before i left on my trip. it's a bad idea for us to talk. ever. i resent her for 100 reasons, she's perpetually unsatisfied with life and whoever she's dating, i'm over feeling like someone who just fills time for her, etc.
anyway, it was a struggle the past few weeks deciding what i wanted to do. had i moved on enough emotionally to let her in a bit or see what she had to say? should i just stay the course and run away faster than i ever had before? i was undecided. somehow, i managed to do both with the end result being a reinstitution of a new and improved "don't contact me again, you ruined my life, you arrogant butch fuck" policy. hopefully she'll stick to it this time, though who can say?
...and then today, because the internet is amazing and because sometimes after a bunch of lemons life actually just hands you lemonade in a tall, chilled glass... [insert dramatic pause]... i found out she got a cat and named him after me.
ok, so not exactly after me. i mean, we don't share the same first and/or last name, but she named him the stupid, cute nickname we used to call one another when we'd get grossed out over how "made for each other" we were. is that fucking precious or what? if this was 6 months ago, 4 months even, i'd feel sad or sentimental or some other nonsense, but at this point, it's just comical. and incredibly just and vindicating. mostly, though, just hilarious. i mean, can you think of a better, more ridiculous foray into an anecdote about dyke drama only to say, "...so she named her cat after me..."?! i challenge you all to post any stories of the like. come on, i need something to keep me laughing while i'm being all studious in a terribly unappealing, midwestern* city!
* this is not to hate on the midwest generally. after all, i do live in the midwest. just the particular city i'm going to is hardly somewhere to be stoked over. so yeah, tell me funny things, no? xo!
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