A while ago I was hanging out with some queer and queer-supportive middle school teachers, and they loved to talk about the gender-variant, visibly future queer kids, girls who played sports and boys who played the lead in musicals. They loved those kids, and looked out for them especially. Teaching ballet, I have very few such students.  I get a very self-selected group, mostly girls, who are inspired by the pink cotton candy vision of ballet they see in picture books.

I was listening to the middle school teachers and thinking that I didn’t have any baby dykes lining up at the barre in black leotards and pink tights, but then I remembered that I had been a baby dyke ballerina, awkward and shy and the worst in the class at first, then confident and loud, rainbow and pro-choice stickers on my makeup case.

I’m glad my friends who are teachers are looking out for the visible potential queers, but I wonder how we can look out for the invisible ones, the baby femmes and the baby queers who aren’t so gender variant in childhood.

Sunday I had my first recital of the year, a roomful of five year olds to supervise and groom. The little ones had their hair in two little buns with pink bows and they were pretty psyched about it, even when their parent dropped them off with a shoddy hairdo that they probably took an hour already and then I made them submit to a second session with hair pins and elastics.

But there was one girl who came back stage after dancing and immediately asked me to undo her hair. When her mom came to get her they fought about it - she was trying to remove the ribbons, her mom wanted to put them back in. It seemed like a fight they’d had before. And I thought of all the friends who are now dykes, tomboys, butches and transmen who tell me funny, uncomfortable, poignant stories of their childhood dance classes and how maybe this girl would grow up to be one of them.

When I was in college we presented a performance called Ex Post Papa, by S. Bear Bergman, about queer community and mentoring, but specifically about butch/transmasculine people mentoring each other. Learning to tie a tie was a symbol of, well, not manhood, but adulthood and membership in the queer community. There was this idea that, if your father didn’t teach you to tie a tie, you need to find some older tie-wearing queer person to teach you, and when you find hir, that older tie-wearing person will also help you find your place in the community and teach you the ways of the queers and so on. A femme acquaintance and I wondered where that left people like us - “I know how to wear a skirt,” she said, “but where’s my femme role model?”

Are some femmes less connected to role models and elders because we’re less visilble to them? Because many of us don’t need help applying eye shadow? Is there a tradition of butch mentoring that doesn’t exist for femmes because femmes have historically been isolated from one another? I’m totally posting Sassafrass style and ending every post with questions.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 7:27 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.