It’s completely crazy for me to think that I’ve been home from the Queer Spirit Camp for a whole week! It was a really great weekend and everyone there was so sweet and wonderful, the show was great, my storytelling workshop occurred in the most beautiful location I’ve ever taught in, there was a pool, I actually had cell reception the list goes on and on! Also worth mentioning was that one of the men fell in love with my style and on Saturday right before I headed back to the city I was gifted with the most gorgeous 1950’s vintage apron that had belonged to another man’s mother!

It was truly an exceptional day- I then came back home where I was greeted at the train station by my partner holding beautiful flowers, and ze took me home where I discovered that ze had not only in my absence had scrubbed the apartment until It shone, AND made a trip to IKEA on the water taxi and returned (via car service) with a brand new bookcase for our bedroom, which ze had also magically managed to get put together! Did I mention that it was a really exciting weekend? Also exciting was that the experience of being up there with other femme show folks really worked to break down more layers of my own fears about femme community.

In the weeks leading up to this show I had many conversations with femme friends about what it was going to be like. Universally, they all thought I was completely nuts. Now, I should preface this by saying that most of the folks I was talking to, like me have in the past been pretty burned by femme friends/femme community and for many of them I am one of the only other femmes they consider themselves capable of being friends with. I’ve defiantly come a long way in recent years with getting over my anxiety about being friends with other femmes, but obviously I still have work to do with it. When I came out as femme I immediately attempted to become part of femme community in the city that I lived in at the time and was shunned majorly. I went to some of the events that would take place and feel like I’d walked back into the girl’s bathroom in middle school and I was the one with toilet paper hanging from my leg. I didn’t want to admit that all these stereotypes about femmes being catty and competitive were true, but it was hard to deny when every attempt I made to have friends or be part of community was met with such blatant hostility.

Since that point I’ve been able to comprehend that the exclusionary competitiveness that I experienced in my first attempts at joining femme community were not the universal experience. That said, I was still nervous about going into the wilds of upstate New York and sharing a cabin with femmes who I’d never met before. I almost wrote a blog about it last week, but decided against it at the last moment for fear that folks going to camp would read it before we met, and the entire situation would be made awkward by my own anxiety. It turns out that I needn’t have worried at all! Performing with The Femme Show and hanging out in our room was without a doubt one of the best interactions with other femmes I’ve ever had! I made new friends in the process, and feel like I proved to myself that femme community is something obtainable! So this week, when femme friends here in the city asked if I survived the weekend in the wilderness with other femmes I’ve offered a resounding YES! : )

This entry was posted on Friday, August 1st, 2008 at 2:17 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.