So there’s this JAKEtalk (like a TEDtalk, but really gay) and I haven’t listened to it all the way through, because he opened his talk with a quotation about Gay Assimilation into the Het world, and then spoke briefly about the Queer Bubble, about increasing (ish?) acceptance of The Gay[1] in mainstream[2] society, and what that means, or could mean, when it comes to maintaining a Queer Identity when that identity is no-longer based on, or reliant upon, being The Other or being an Outsider.
Which seems very strange to me, at first blush, so I thought I’d ramble a bit and see if I can parse it out. (The JAKEtalk intro is being used as a jumping-off-point here, rather than this post being an actual response to anything in the JAKEtalk).
Onwards!
So, look. I’m a weirdo. I spent my teens and early 20s wearing All The Velvet and All The Eyeliner because (a) PRETTY!, but also because (b) I figured out fairly early on that, at 6’4”, there is no protective colouration that will make e look “normal”, so I might as well (i) wear what I actually like, and/or (ii) give them something to fucking stare at.
So I’m fairly well-versed in Identity As Defined By Otherness, even if it’s on the relatively shallow level of being an unusually shaped/sized cis chick. I’m pagan – in the “Bioregional Animism” and “Ancestor Veneration” senses of the word, rather than the more widely recognized “Wiccan Offshoots” sense of the word (thank you gods, for a country where we have “Freedom TO”-based freedom of religion), and I’m a poly, kinky bi-dyke femme. A lot of my personal identities/labels/shorthands-for-what-I-am are frequently explained by highlighting the ways that they contrast with more mainstream/normative/normalized identities.
BUT that doesn’t mean that my identities can’t exist without that opposition.
Being married to my wife doesn’t make me Not Queer. Or “not queer enough” for that matter.
One of my poly-leather family members once said (gods, lifetimes ago now, back when my wife and I hadn’t even been dating for six months yet) that being a “married queer” didn’t change the way that she built family, that she didn’t stop being poly (or kinky, or anti-o, or a TIFD) just because she was also a Nice Jewish Girl with a ring on her left finger.
This has stuck with me for years now.
I love my Bubble. My kinky, poly, trans-inclusive dyke bubble is awesome. But, specifically because it’s so awesome, I kind of wish 100% of humanity was in here with me. Not in here diluting the awesomeness with their hetcis-normative expectations, with their “stay out of my bathroom” and their “I don’t understand how that kind of relationship could be anything but abusive”, their “porn is the theory” and their “multiple concurrent relationships are a sign of emotional immaturity[3]”, their “you’re in love with your own oppression” and their “you just haven’t found the right man yet”… No. I mean I want 100% of humanity in here with our norms and ideals and social expectations[4] which, largely, boil down to “Your kink[5] is okay, whether or not it’s mine” and that the more options we have, and can put words around, the better.
I don’t think that we stop having our identities just because more people accept, normalize, and celebrate them.
My wife is not “less poly” just because her mother is happy to meet her many partners, and to have us in attendance for her 65th birthday. I’m not “less queer” just because my own gay auntie paved the way for me in our family, or because her parents responded with absolute love (I know, because she read the letter from them, responding to her coming-out letter, at my wedding) when she came out decades ago. My friends are not “less trans” because zir mom took zir shopping for more gender-appropriate clothing, or because her nieces call her their favourite auntie; and they’re not “less kinky” because they can talk about their desires and relationships with their vanilla friends.
We do not stop being what we are just because the Normal People still love us, or let us on the PTA, or look to us as part of our faith community. Being unwanted is not a prerequisite for being us.
It’s sucks beyond all possible measure that any of my poly friends have to keep coming out to their families-of-origin, have to worry about how said relatives are going to handle it when they bring their multiple people home for the holidays. It sucks beyond all possible measure that my family members have fam-of-o or (extended-community-members, for that matter – get with the program, y’all…) who keep getting their pronouns wrong even though it’s been YEARS since they came out. It sucks beyond all possible measure that any of my dyke Fam has to deal with out and out hatred as part of “being a good daughter”.
I know that we face this stuff, that our bubble is (our bubbles are) how we protect each other, hold each other up, keep each other safe, help each other heal. And I don’t want to lose the love that comes with building our own families in spite of the Charmed Circle wishing that we weren’t around being our fabulous, unapologetic selves “at” them. But we don’t have to lose it.
We don’t have to stop being big-hearted and open-hearted with each other just because we’re gaining the chance to be open-hearted with the people we came from, too.
TTFN,
Ms. Syren.
[1] Less-so The Trans, so let’s keep pushing for that one, shall we?
[2] Meaning heteronormative, cisnormative.
[3] TRY IT SOME TIME, I DARE YOU, KIDDO.
[4] Which, full disclosure: I ain’t perfect yet. None of us are. But I know where I’m going.
[5] Gender / family-structure / body / employment situation / sexual identity / etc – Choose your own adventure(s).
Tag Archive: identity
The idea of Stone, the idea of Femme. I’ve heard descriptions of “stone femme” wherein the femme in question is The Queen of Cups – receptive, reactive, responsive, the partner whose moan, shiver, arch, pushes the energy back, completes the emotional/energetic/erotic loop so that it can cycle through again. In this context (in any context?) Femme Bottom (any bottom?) is all appetite.
But so am I.
I read Xan West’s writing about Stone, about the gaze, about desire and how a partner’s responses can make them come, just with breath, with sound, with need. And this is so familiar to me.
I’m not stone. My clothes can come off when I fuck, am maybe at my most powerful, most “toppy”, when I’m in nothing by sweat-slicked skin and high heeled shoes; I crave touch, hunger for it, too, but it’s scary as fuck and hard to stay in my body to accept it, let alone welcome it, without overthinking everything or flinching/freezing pre-emptively. I’m seven years (twenty years? thirty?) into trying to navigate my way through this minefield of fear, body, and performativity, towards the pleasure, openness, sincerity, the offering that I want to give in vulnerability, in desire, but also towards my own ability to accept the offering I want to receive, crave receiving, as a dominant bottom.
I’m femme.
When Tara Hardy writes “I, too, have a mouth”, about wanting to taste the world; when Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha writes about femme hunger and needing to be cautious when it comes to sharing the gulf of that ravenous need… That’s me.
As a femme top, as someone who is all appetite, who is all mouth, I am not the Queen of Cups. Following you with hungry eyes, I want you to see, and respond to, my desire. At my purest, I am the Great Devourer: I want to eat you alive. I want you to like it. To offer yourself up to my hunger, to the tongue that would taste every quivering, shuddering inch of you.
Xan writes, in “Where Pleasure Resides” (same link as above), a lot about cocks. I don’t have one of those. It’s not a word that fits me. But I deeply understand the yearning to get energetically inside someone, to find her mouth of fire, coax it open with the red, red pulse of my tongue – physical, energetic, or both – until I am so deep inside that I can lap at her heart and coax that open, too.
This is what I want.
This is also what I dread.
I don’t know how much of it is conditioning – my mother telling me, in my teens, that once you’ve fucked someone your heart goes with them, too – versus how much of this is true to the actual connection between touch and trust, between sexual vulnerability and emotional vulnerability, that exists in my body. But, yes, if I let someone fuck me, get inside me, even just feed me – though it’s easier to avoid when I’m topping (“less direct” is the wrong way to say it, but… riding a response is not the same as generating that response, and there’s an emotional buffer in that difference) – the chances that I’ll fall in love with them, want a deep, lasting emotional connection with them, rise dramatically. And that’s scary. Terrifying. And also yearned for.
I’m hungry and afraid to eat.
What a damn silly place to be.
TTFN,
Ms Syren.
So, for the first time since 2005, Ottawa is having a Ms National Capital Leather competition.
While I have some… Issues… with the fact that the announcement that a Ms NC Leather was happening came out less than a month before the actual competition date (which I’m just not going to get into), I *am* glad that the competition is running and I’m hoping there’s a good turn-out of leather-savvy competitors for the Ms NC Leather title.
What I wanted to talk about, or muse about, or ask about, today was: What makes a Leather Dyke?
See, my girl and I were talking about Ms NC Leather, and who was signed up to compete, and what-not, and eventually we came around to this:
“I don’t think of you as a leather dyke.” She said she thinks of me as a femme domme with a sadistic streak, but that she couldn’t, for example, see me drinking in [Toronto gay leather bar] in my engineers’ boots[1].
I asked her if “leather dyke” required a certain degree of butchness (which is a weird-ass thing to be asking of a leather-dyke-identified femme, let me tell you).
And she said No, but that she wasn’t entirely sure what it did require.
I mean, obviously, a leather dyke isn’t just a (kinky) dyke who wears a lot of leather, otherwise it would be less a question of “That term doesn’t fit you” and more a question of “So where do we get you some leather?” And/or these kind of leather would qualify which, working from an equally nebulous place, I’m guessing they don’t. (Although I loved the excuse to go looking for non-black-and-studded leather goodies, I have to admit).
So. There’s more to it than that. But what? Is it a certain swagger or tough-assed-ness that brings to mind the word “diesel”? Is it community-involvement? Is it an affinity for, and acceptance of, Traditional protocols is D/s situations? Is it something else? Is it some/all of the above?
Have at me, folks. What makes a leather dyke a leather dyke?
– Cheers,
– Ms. Syren
[1] Possibly because I don’t have engineers’ boots, but that’s beside the point. Unless it isn’t.
syrens 