An excerpt! From the zine!
Monday, September 4th, 2006Hey y’all: this is an excerpt from my new zine. It should be finished by my birthday, so let me know if you want to read the whole thing. Much love, ives
I am simultaneously excited and confused by this turn of events. In some ways, turning 30 is kind of like having a dirty and dangerous lover who doesn’t actually give me an orgasm. Like, it’s kind of hot and kind of offensive, and I am kind of pinned to the bed but it doesn’t really feel all that good, but it doesn’t feel bad yet I don’t want it to stop because it feels like it’s going to get really good really soon and regardless, it looks really hot, so I’m going to keep turning around and looking at how hot that shit is and wish that somebody could take a picture. I am forever turning away from my spectacular self, always looking to see how it looks. I watch myself being watched: always.
So what is interesting about living my late twenties is that I’ve felt as if for the first time, I am not just watching my body but I am living in my body. I am no longer anorexic, I am no longer confused in the way I was before about my sexuality or my identity, I can hardly even remember the pain of being raped or assaulted or what that felt like. My scars have been beautifully sewn up by the strong hands of people I’ve lived and loved with, and now I reside in a body with very little dark corners of misunderstanding.
But at this time when I started feeling so foxy super fine confident ( like I am all hot Zen and white lightening and my movements are quick and sharp) I dive-bombed myself into this crazy heteronormative paegentry of entitlement, decided to become a high school history teacher (a job that is awesome and political for many reasons, but which involves some policing of my own identity by the rigorous scrutiny of adminstrators, students, parents and co-workers), and moved myself clear across the country to a city that is not know for it’s welcomeness to strangers.
And instead of confidently rocking myself as I always have (get used to this shit, world), I’ve found myself hesitant around things, and then, of course, surprised at my hesitance. Things that I do that seem totally normal and even special and generously important to me (having public sex, ass fucking on the first date, having multiple sex partners, getting fisted or even just talking about fisting loudly with friends over coffee) are really actually quite bizarre and potentially fucked up to the straight world. I sometimes look at some my dating situations now through the eyes of an “outsider” (yes, someone outside of the subculture); through their lenses, I should be either committed to a group home or pastorally cared for as a diseased individual.
For instance, let’s look at the people that I worked with last semester. I student teach at a high school, with 3 girls that are in my program at
Boston College . They are both really nice girls, very into their boyfriends and also into wearing these outfits all the time that I can only describe as ‘frothy.’ By that I mean that they seem to have a lot of accoutrements: various feathers and non-functional fuzzy buttons and pearl drops hanging off sweaters and things like that. They wear pointy-toed shoes and stiletto boots. Our supervisor was a very intense hardliner administrative type person. She wears stiletto heels also, but generally wears vice-principal attire, and always carries around a giant binder of lots of index tabs. (I have certain irritations with the way she runs her hands up and down the divider tabs of her binder, but that’s another topic).
2 girls and I tended to have lunch together in the teacher’s room. The real teachers talked union shop talk, and the 3 of us tended to talk about boyfriends. By this I mean that these girls had conversations about their boyfriends, and I ate my hardboiled egg and acted like I was playing along. The conversation usually went like this:
Bootsy: Oh my god, my boyfriend’s TV was broken this weekend, so we couldn’t watch Lost.
Mitsy: Oh my god, my boyfriend’s cable wasn’t working this weekend either!
Bootsy: So annoying.
Mitsy: I know. We went out to dinner instead.
Ivy: (chewing thoughtfully)
I tend to keep my personal life very far away from my school life, but sometimes my desire to belong overrides my better sense. And, as you may or may not know, at the time, I was in a serious relationship with my best friend, who is a non-trans fag. So, one afternoon, when I busted out “my boyfriend,” I didn’t realize at the time how much it would change the dynamic of our conversations, but suddenly I was in a sorority with these girls. it was pretty dramatic when I did. I wasn’t really thinking of the long-term affect of having a boyfriend to talk about it; I was shortsightedly focused on the conversation at hand, and when Mitsy asked me where I was going for Spring Break, I said, “To visit my boyfriend.” Bootsy and Mitsy squealed with such delight and surprise that I knew right away that they had tagged me as a dyke but were now really excited that I like dick.
They immediately wanted all the details. Hmmmm, ladies. What details do you want? I mean, do you want to know how big his dick is, because it’s pretty big, and do you want to know what a little fag he is, because he’s a total bitch, and do you want to know how queer is queer? Because, girls, it’s pretty queer.
Sometimes I realize that it does not matter to me that these girls don’t know the whole story, because who are they to me? What do Bootsy and Mitsy mean to me? But it’s not about them: it’s about my story, my partners, and my details. It’s about feeling like I have to hide these things; therefore, I don’t feel like I am necessarily choosing to keep private the details of some of the other hot and wonderful people I am dating here in
Boston . So, when I came to school in late spring, all freshly fucked after an amazing night of amazingly hot sex with a new (local) lover, I couldn’t plop myself down with the Sex In the City crowd and say, “Oh my god, Bootsy. Guess how hot and off the hook shit was last night!” And yet, if Mikey had been in town and I had gotten some deep dicking last night, I would have felt comfortable doing so, and Bootsy and Mitsy would have squealed with delight and probably ask me what my favorite position is.
And all of those thoughts were for someone who, if Bootsy and Mitsy had met, would have read as a straight man. This is intensely heightened with the potential for me to message about my other lovers, or myself and the kinds of relationships I conduct. When the pronoun precedes the presentation, how are we messaging who we love, who we fuck, who we are? In a heavily mainstreamed world, people accept a certain type of shorthand. But they have less access to my shorthand, and I fumble with language trying to either approximate it, or hide it all together.
I feel like there are a few levels to having to keep my real life under wraps: the queerness, the genderqueerness and the nonmongamy.
The queerness is in some ways a matter of process, or gradient based on who knows what and has access to what points of information. Do straight people have the necessary information with which to deconstruct everything, so that if I said that I was a fag in this relationship with Mikey that they would understand? Or do I need to give them a graphic organizer to help them take it all apart and recontextualize their idea of sex so that it’s completely sensical that dykes and fags could date each other without ever using the word “bisexual,” or that genderqueer is a state of being or that I think that the gender binary is really some new kind of dildo and can go get fucked.
Most people don’t, I think, examine their own gender identity with the amount of scrutiny that makes something like this possible, or even useful.
But this is how I see it. And this is what I carry around with me the tightest as I think through a whole host of other issues. Really, what about – I mean, really what-to-the-nth-degree about — being a genderqueer teacher? What about being a gay teacher at all? What will it be like as we (as a community grow older), in general? How do we care for each other’s process and praxis and lives and changes? Who will help me take care of my parents if I’m alone? Who will I raise kids with? What will all of those relationships look like?
So I start teaching tomorrow. I have my faggy teacher outfit ready to go, and these questions are looming prominently in my mind. Perhaps I should be spending my time thinking about my pedagogy much more than my personal relationships and presentation within the school culture context, but it is irrevocably true that we teach who we are. And for the first time in my adult life, I feel that the reality of who I am is simultaneously at its most vulernable and most clear. It’s waiting to be told, but I’m not sure who is going to hear it, or what will construct the message. I’m scared and excited and hopeful. As per usual.
