Missed Her, page 7
“Oh, now you’re going to get all angry at me. How typically male of you.”
The conversation continued to swirl around the drain like that for a short while, and finally my friend realized this was a discussion he was biologically predestined to never win, so he went back to reading his book. Or should I say, my book? He bought it with his own money.
My friend and I had a lengthy caffeine-fueled discussion about it all later that afternoon. The first thing I felt when he told me this story was shame. Shame for my people. Shame that she slid herself so seamlessly into the stereotypical shell of the man-hating lesbian and harassed a perfect stranger on the bus, backhandedly in my name.
He reminded me that we had no way of knowing the kind of pain or suffering that the young woman might have survived at the hands of men that looked just like him. He reminded me that even though she pissed him off and he walked away feeling defensive and ruffled, he never once felt unsafe, and that we might not be able to say the same thing for her. I feel it is important to the narrative here to stress again that it was he who reminded me of these things, not the other way around.
And it got me to thinking. I was reminded of a discussion I had recently with a femme friend of mine who is the coordinator of a women’s centre at a university, and every September she does orientations for the new students, of all genders. She tells all the young men that she assumes that they are her allies in the fight against sexism. That she assumes they are on her side and there to help her change the world, until proven otherwise. She tells me she loves to watch them raise their heads and straighten their shoulders. She loves to watch the young women too, as it washes across their faces that they can be real feminists and fight sexism and get to keep their boyfriends if they want to; it doesn’t make them any less a part of the sisterhood.
What a powerful thought. To assume that the stranger on the bus is on your side, until he (or she) proves that they are not. To drop the gloves and turn the boxing ring into a place to talk and listen to each other, instead of using the winds of change to fan the flames of conflict. I was reminded of this last week by a friend of mine. Remember him? He kind of looks like a redneck. But he is not.
One Among the Many
The room smelled like hair wax and Old Spice deodorant and cigarette smoke caught in clothes. There was the clunk of shit-kicker boots and the creak of leather jackets and talking. Always there was talking. I was in the conference room of a hotel in downtown Oakland, at the first ever Butch Voices conference, billed as “four days of workshops, entertainment and bonding for butches, aggressives, studs, and allies.” It was the first time in my life I had ever been in a room surrounded by people like me, and I was dumbfounded. So many barbershop haircuts and biceps and work boots. There were ponytails too, and cornrows, and three-piece suits. Older butches who made me feel like I was still just a kid, and little baby butches that made me remember when my jeans fit like that. Every possible variation on butch, in all sizes, and many colours.
I remember thinking this is what straight, athletic men must feel like at a hockey game, but then realized that actually they get to feel like this all the time, so in fact it was not the same thing at all. Not the same thing as waiting forty years to be just one among the many.
An hour or so earlier, I had rolled my luggage into the marble foyer, convinced I had the wrong hotel. Everything was so spotless and fancy; I could not imagine four hundred butches descending upon this sterile place. The valets were all in red uniforms. The Muzak was soothing, if you were into panpipes. I was almost surprised when the well-groomed woman behind the counter found my reservation.
I got into the elevator with a dashing, salt-and-pepper-haired black man with an immaculately trimmed moustache and stylishly thin beard. The man smiled widely at me and nodded hello.
“You here for the conference too?” The handsome woman I had mistaken for a handsome man had a rich, deep, but unmistakably female voice. Not the honey-over-gravel timbre I have come to love from my trans male friends. Something different in the tone of her voice. Something familiar, too.
I nodded, and leaned up against the elevator wall. I was in the right place after all. Exactly the right place, in fact. I breathed in the smell of her cologne, let my eyes fall over her a little, trying not to look like I was noticing her pressed dress shirt and pants, her perfect silver and black beard and moustache, the shine on her shoes, her wide shoulders and short square nails.
“My name is Grey.” She extended a long-fingered hand for me to shake. “So I’ll see you tonight at the meet and greet then?”
I cannot capture in one thousand words or less exactly what transpired for me during the four days that followed, and what the experience meant for me. I could never describe the heart balm that I felt spending four days surrounded by everything and everyone butch, so I will just relate a few highlights.
Art all over the place, by butches, about butches. Photographs, paintings, films, the works. Not just a fleeting glimpse of a sort of butch. Not butch as the butt of a joke. Not a straight girl playing a butch on TV. Not a watered-down version of butch made palatable enough for mainstream taste buds. Real images and depictions of people who looked a whole lot like me. A glimpse at my own history. Proof that we have always been here, and evidence that we intend to continue to exist.
An all-butch tap dance ensemble. Need I say more about how great this was?
A multi-generational all-butch panel discussion. Hearing a seventy-three-year-old butch woman talk about seducing women during the war. And by the war I mean the Second World War. This was also one of the discussions I found most difficult to sit through. One of the panelists came of age in the seventies, and was what some would call a decidedly second-wave feminist lesbian separatist. She had what I found to be a lot of hateful things to say about my trans brothers, and patronizing and narrow-minded things to say about my femme sisters. I guess it was naïve to think we were just all going to get along. I squirmed in my seat, my blood starting to boil. My new friend Grey was right beside me, and she leaned towards me so we could whisper.
“I want her to shut up right now. She is being so divisive. We finally get a chance to come together and she is trying to pit us all against each other. Listen to her, she is spewing hate,” I whispered between clenched teeth.
Grey tipped her head to one side, took a deep breath. Placed her palm on my leg, peaceful.
“You are mistaking fear for hate. Look at her. All I see is her fear. She is so afraid of disappearing.” Grey spoke in that smooth, deep voice of hers, the one I had already learned to love.
Later I heard an old-school butch in a dapper suit give a keynote speech on feminism. She got a standing ovation before she even started talking, and another when she was finished.
And then there was all the talking. We talked in workshops, in the gym, in the halls outside our hotel rooms, over breakfast, lunch, dinner, and late-night drinks. We talked about chivalry and non-monogamy and history and politics and sex and sexuality and femmes and faggots and boxers versus briefs. What was most amazing for me was the stuff we didn’t need to talk about. That was what touched me most, I think. Everything I didn’t have to say, all the things that didn’t need explaining. I didn’t worry about being understood or believed, because for the first time in my life I was surrounded by other butches. And they just knew.
Throwing in the Towel
Sometimes you say things without really thinking. Sometimes you write things on Facebook without really thinking about the nine hundred people who will read them.
It all started with the towels. Not just any towels, mind you. These were brand new, fresh out of the laundry, white, pristine, and über-fluffy. I had just stepped out of my clawfoot bathtub in my new-to-me bathroom in my recently painted apartment and into the softest, most absorbent and slightly lemony scented towel this forty-year-old ass has ever felt. That towel wicked the moisture away from my butt like a dream. It felt better than my mother’s towels. Better than a fancy hotel towel, even, mostly because it was mine and I knew for a fact mine was the first ass it had ever wicked water from.
It’s the little things, right? I sat my luxurious towel-wrapped ass down at my desk in front of my computer and wrote, “My new towels are so fluffy and absorbent. I feel like a queen. A queen, I tell you.” And then I hit “share.”
Within minutes, the comments started to roll in. My lady friends all concurred. Some of my butch friends, well, some butch bonding time. A small debate ensued. A femme friend of mine suggested we all conceptualize fine linens as a high quality tool, used to entice fine ladies into your bathtub. We riffed some about stereotypes. I thought it was over.
The next day, I hung the freshly hemmed and pressed, sand-coloured velvet draperies in my living room, and stood back to appreciate how well they complemented the dark olive accent wall and the bone-white window trim. What can I say? It has pretty much been five years since I have had a stable, solo, sexy roof over my head. I am nesting. I sat at my desk and wrote: “Enjoying my new draperies like I do does not make me any less butch.”
And again with the stream of comments. One of my friends responded that butches were supposed to keep thoughts like that to ourselves. Someone said that draperies could be butch as long as there were no pink bows on them. Someone else suggested that we needed a word for a butch metrosexual. This began a longer discussion on the various types of butch: soft butch, stone butch, old school, fag butch, gentlebutch, dandy.
I should say that all of this was fairly good-natured, and everyone’s feathers went for the most part unruffled, at least on the page. But something about the whole discussion bugged me, and it got me to thinking about it all.
My first question was for myself. Why did I care if my butchness was called into question anyway? In my whole entire life I have never felt anything but butch, even before I knew the word. That is certainly the way the world views me (going mostly on what rednecks call me from passing truck windows) and how my lovers place me on the fuckability spectrum. So why did someone I barely knew calling me a girl and suggesting I needed some butch bonding time chap my tender ass so much? Perhaps it was all those soft towels making me more thin-skinned than usual? And what was up with my butch brothers and sisters? I re-read the comments. Most of the femmes who responded maintained that the word butch didn’t need adjectives or qualifiers: just butch would do the trick. It was mostly butches who were uncomfortable with my love of fluffy towels and draperies, and mostly butches who felt the need to further categorize ourselves.
One of the femmes who responded posed the following: “There’s also an element of internalized homophobia in all of this. Maybe it’s a conceptual leap but it seems to me that the notion that a ‘real’ butch can’t like a fluffy towel or use words coded as feminine to describe her-/him-/hir-self isn’t that far from the idea that it’s not okay for boys to play with dolls. Are queer masculinities (or whatever you want to call them) so fragile? Their beauty, diversity, and resilience over the generations prove otherwise.”
I thought about it all some more. Thought back to being eight years old, and frozen in the girl’s dressing room at the ladies’ wear store on Main Street in Whitehorse. My aunt was getting married and my mom was insisting that wearing anything but a dress to the wedding would be rude and she wasn’t going to tolerate any more arguments from me about how dressy my brown corduroy suit could really be with the right blouse. I was being forced to try on this yellow and grey dress. My mom and the shop lady were looming outside the dressing room door, taking turns cajoling and threatening me to come out and show them how I looked. My guts were in my throat and all the moisture in my mouth was now collecting in my eyes. I was seriously too humiliated to open the door and come out. I was afraid of the wrath of my mother, and scared of the scorn of the saleswoman, but I was even more terrified of how vulnerable and wrong I felt in my body, in my skin, in my life in that dress. It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to be a girl. And it wasn’t as easy as just wishing that I was a boy. It was the horrible realization that I was facing a world where there were no clothes for me because I didn’t fit the world.
So I don’t think that butch fear of our own femininity is all that simple to unravel. It is not just our own misogyny that makes us see anything less than manly as weak or less than. Our fear of our own inner girl is so much more complicated than that. Most of us grew up uncomfortable not only in our clothes, but in our pink bedrooms, our gender roles, our families’ expectations, and even our own skins. We had to fight to find ourselves in all of that. And sometimes that makes it hard to drop all that armor and just sit back and enjoy the fucking draperies.
On Angels and Afterlife
On November 29, 2009, Catherine White Holman, my friend of seventeen years, was killed in a plane crash. It seems unreal to me still, even as I write these words. She was so beloved by so many, how could truth be so cruel, so unfair and brutal?
The two weeks following the tragedy were a blur of tears and grief and joy and old friends and buried hatchets and community. Catherine was known for her enormous heart, and the evidence that her heart is still beating in all of us is everywhere: the amazing army of friends and family who gathered immediately, the crowd of souls who sent so many condolences that it crashed the website, the several hundreds of mourners who lined the candlelit streets and filled the WISE Hall in Vancouver’s East End for an eight-hour wake the likes of which even this Irish Catholic kid has never seen. All of this shone a light on how much she brought to this world, and just how much she will be missed. All of this is a sign of the passing of a truly remarkable woman.
This year was grief-heavy for me. My beloved gran, Florence, passed away in May, and then Catherine, who truly was one of my very favourite ladies in the whole wide world. I have studied loss these last few months, and pondered the giant questions of life. I am told that Catherine did not believe in a life after death, though this is something I never discussed with her. I know for certain that my gran believed in heaven, and if there is anything resembling a great reward in the sky, then I know of no souls more deserving than these two women. The Catholic sisters at my gran’s funeral confessed to me that they looked to Flo when their own faith wavered, as my gran’s never, ever faltered. As a counsellor, Catherine leaves behind thousands of people whom she helped find a doctor or housing or treatment, or simply just listened to; people who swear that she saved their lives. If you ask me, if they both are not angels right now, then there is no such thing.
As for afterlife, I know what I would like to believe, and I know what I feel. There is no evidence of a heaven, but I do see traces of an afterlife every single day. I believe that people live on in the people who live. It’s as simple as that. My gran lives on in me every time I recycle a Ziploc bag, every day that I work hard, every time that I reach out to care for my family, every time I remember to be grateful, every time I remember my scarf and gloves, every time I eat the leftovers instead of letting them go to waste. Every time I eat a raspberry hard candy and stuff a used Kleenex into my jacket pocket. Every time I light a candle, she is there in me.
Catherine helped me through some rough times. Several years ago, I dragged a friend of mine off the streets and kept her home with me for a couple of weeks while she cleaned up and tried to get into a recovery program. Everyone else told me I was crazy, that my friend was a drug addict and a fuck-up and that I was just enabling her, keeping her from hitting bottom. Everyone told me the best thing I could do was nothing, and let my friend eventually help herself. So I went to see Catherine. She showed me into her little office in Three Bridges, and busted out a fresh box of Kleenex. I explained to her that I had been calling every morning for thirteen days trying to get my friend into detox, but by the time a bed finally became available I was informed that she was too clean for detox and now was on a sixty-day waiting list for a bed in a treatment house. I told her I could barely sleep because of the stress, and was afraid to leave my house in case the people my friend owed money to caught up with her; I was afraid of being robbed, or worse. She took out a binder and told me to call this place and talk to this guy, not that guy but this guy, to tell him Catherine said so. She told me who to call and where to go and what to do. And then she let me cry at her little coffee table for an hour. She told me I was a good friend, that I was doing the right thing, that everybody needed someone who wouldn’t give up on them. She knew my friend too, and loved her at least a little, I think. She told me that if the roles were reversed, my friend would do the very same thing for me, and that no one would ever get clean without someone who believed that they could. And then where would we be?
So. This is what I know about an afterlife. Every time you remember to smile with your whole damn face, Catherine lives in you. Every time you welcome a stranger to the party. Every time you laugh with your whole body, every time you love with your whole heart. Every time you dress up in your finest. Every time you flick back your long silver hair and get that twinkle in your eye. Every time you cry at a good story. Every time you drink tequila and smoke on your porch in your chair. Every time you wink at a cute butch. Every time you ride on the back of a motorcycle. Every time you stick up for the underdog, the unlucky, the disenfranchised, the addicted, the people whose family forgot them, the undervalued and the misunderstood, Catherine lives in you. Every time you keep the peace, keep the faith, keep on keeping on. Every time you sing in the truck. Every time you fuck who you want where and how you want to without fear or shame or reservation, Catherine White Holman will be smiling at you from somewhere. This I know for sure.
Somebody told me at the memorial that the only way we could make up for losing a heart the size of Catherine’s is to put all of ours together.
My friend and neighbour saw me in the hallway of my building the other day, puffy-eyed and numb. He said something I would like to remember. Something I will repeat. He said, “I never know what the right thing to say is in these times, but I’m almost always around, and I got two ears to listen.”
