H. and I go to Jaded Lounge for all-queer, all-asian cabaret. We eat biscuits, corn, and mac and cheese from Kentucky Fried Chicken, I have a beer that I’ll only drink half of and she has something pink. We look around. I whisper, is it bad that I’m wondering why the white straight-appearing couples are here? She says, I was wondering that but then I told myself that’s fucked up.

We have so many stories about being alone, we come out into these amorphous communities and all we want is to not be alone anymore. Our monkey brains say, categorize to survive, separate enemies from friends, know your tribe. We’ve been rejected so many times and we want to know who’s safe, so we draw these lines with our eyes to say who belongs and who doesn’t. We hurt each other this way, but we keep doing it.

We want to be seen for who we are, but we don’t know who that is, so we define ourselves against other people, more butch, less femme, soft butch, chapstick femme, lesbian, queer.

We grow into and out of labels. Lesbian used to feel revolutionary, now it sounds to my ears like the establishment, like banana republic button downs and small silver earrings and softball and money. I say queer almost all the time now, except when I joke about things that are “so lesbian,” usually in a hippy crunchy folk music sort of way.

But really, don’t I have plenty in common with those lesbians? Probably more than I’d like to admit. I think I forget sometimes that there is a big straight monolithic america out there, and it all thinks we’re the same.

I get dressed for tonight’s madfemmepride butch-femme discussion group. It’s bitter, face-numbing cold, too cold for skirts. I just want to wear jeans and a sweater, than worry that I look too business-casual, like one of those lesbians. I add hoop earrings with little strawberries on them, a white head band with red polka dots. Why do I feel queerer in accessories from Claire’s, every 13 year-old’s favorite store? What is wrong with me that I worry about this stuff? Of course, the truth is that I’m worrying about other things today, these worries are just place holders for bigger, scarier things.

It starts to rain as I make my way down South and Centre streets for afternoon coffee-and-working. I don’t want rain, I want snow. I want potato chips but they don’t have any of the good kind. I want love and community and to be a good person who doesn’t judge other people by their clothes. I want security and belonging. I want to put myself in the worst light possible on the internet for the world to see and have the world like me anyway. I want a lot of things. It’s been a rough week.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 3:02 pm and is filed under musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.