visibility again
November 19th, 2008 maggie
Wow, it’s been too quiet around here. I wrote you a post last week about What Queers Are Carping About On the Internets This Week and it got eaten by a poor internet connection. Don’t worry, you didn;t miss much.
This post got me thinking about mentoring and community, but I can’t seem to think about that without thinking about visibility again. Lately the girfriend and I have been out at fancy queer functions in public. At the local queer theater festival, I stood with a femme friend and a new aquaintence, idly watching the gf in line for her free drink (muff divers and sparkling twinks were on the menu!). My friend said something about masculine women, and I noted that the girlfriend was chatting with the three older butches in line behind her. Look, I said, that happens wherever she goes, at work, walking her neighborhood, everywhere.
Maybe it’s my social anxiety, maybe it’s my personality, but I never feel like I instantly connect with people like that, femme, butch, or otherwise. Really, I think we just don’t see each other. And then there’s the way I guard myself in public. It’s one part New England reserve and two parts protecting myself from sexual harrassment and so on by keeping my head down. In my own neighborhood I am a little more open in my stance. So I guess I don’t know how much of this is me and how much of it is us.
It does happen sometimes, though. The girlfriend and I were on the train this summer across from an ordinary, feminine looking girl, who I wouldn’t have thought might be queer except that she was reading an anthology of lesbian African-American fiction (something like that - I forget the title.) She caught me looking at the book cover and smiled. I was queered by the presence of the GF, she was queered by her book - otherwise we would never have connected. Bittersweet.
