Butch Bodied Femme and the Man Nod

A few months ago, I was sitting around the back tables at QEJ with Amber, Jay, some interns and some other folks and we were talking about our identities. Other than Jay and our awesome intern V, QEJ has now and always has been staffed and run by an overwhelming number of femmes---male and female.

On this particular day, we were all chatting about our plethora of identities, and when it got to me, I outed myself as a femme. Amber looked up and looked at me and said, "Your femme identified?"
And I responded, "Have you met me?"

For years, I have identified myself as femme. In Minneapolis, I was an early member of the Femme Mafia (sigh how I miss my hometown femme posse), and I have written about and spoken about what it means, for me, to identify as femme. Not since my twink days (see my recent blog post with pictures from that era), though, have I had a body type that is often associated with femme boys. To be clear, femme boys are often either thought of us very skinny types, the twinky femme, or the big girl femmes with large and in charge fierce bodies. But as my body has become more and more stereotypically "masculine," I have had to out myself as a butch bodied femme more and more and then explain what that means.

Here I go again.

I was raised, largely, by a single Mom, with an amazing step-Mom, and all of the most significant influential people in my life have been women. When I moved from Duluth, MN to Kansas City, MO and the kids in the neighborhood would form step lines, the guys never wanted me, so I learned how to step girl style. When I came out, it was into a fierce community of queer women at Warren Wilson College, and I was often proud to be the only boy ever invited to Girls Night Out with the hot Atlanta lesbians at Wilson. While, I do not carry myself in what many folks consider a stereotypically "femme" manner (which is problematic in and of itself)...the fact of the matter is that I am femme through and through with femme sensibilities, femme tastes, and femme expression in so many ways.

It just so happens that the men in my family are all broad shouldered with thick legs and bubble butts. It's a burden, but I will gladly bear it.

What is even more interesting, is that in my mind, I am clearly a femme and I am floored every time a straight woman flirts with me. I think I scream....HEY GIRL HEY....with every step.  But recently...I have crossed into new territory. Because of my body transformation and my size, now the straightest of the straight guys give me the "nod." That secret and mystical "what's up" head nod that says...."you are one of us." When the big ripped manly men trainers at the gym started doing it, I knew I had crossed into some new and strange and alien territory. Somehow, my body has transgressed and crossed over into an area of masculinity to which I have never before had access, and it makes me giggle my ass off. That somehow, the fact that I can lift a certain amount of weight or have a certain body type gives me stature in some primal, probably biological, way with other men is something that is absolutely fascinating to me. The trainers at my gym KNOW that I am gay, especially considering two of my exes also work out there and I have never been shy when it comes to PDA. But something in these men's heads has clicked on and they now give me a level of respect and recognition that I have never had from straight men ever.

Butch bodied femme is something else.

 I do have to say a shining moment came recently, at QEJ's major donor party, when the subject of femmes came up and my darling V came to my defense and proudly declared that I am a butch bodied femme. I just love it when the butches come to my aid. *swoon*

Gender, sexual orientation and gender presentation are a beautiful complicated mash up.....one day I will tell you of my insane love of butch bottoms....but that's a another blog. Until then....kiss a femme and appreciate all the work that goes into being just this fabulous!

 

Juan Williams is a Coconut

Growing up, I was taunted and traumatized by words like coconut and Oreo. For those not in the know, calling someone coconut (or Oreo or pineapple or apple) is a way that brown, black, and red folks often respond to other brown, black and red folks that, in their opinion, "act white." The connotation is that a coconut (which I keep writing as cocunt....which is a vagina shared by Siamese twins) is an individual that is brown or black on the outside and white on the inside. --(Asian kids that acted white were pineapples, Native kids that acted white were apples--most likely Macintosh as I don't know many Green indigenous folks so Granny Smith just wouldn't work in the same way, and if someone called me Honey Crisp I would probably have been delighted and gave him a kiss).

Now for most of us that grew up being called one of these variation, the experience was traumatizing and the impetus for the taunting had little to do with us "acting white." It had everything to do with the the anti-intellectualism that has been ingrained in many of our communities, so, for example, when my Mother moved us from Duluth, MN to a black neighborhood in Kansas City, MO, my brother and I were attacked as "coconuts and Oreos," because of our northern English (we were also called "proper," by kids in the hood...which would make me cry)--and also because of the fact that the reading book that I had in 2nd grade was the one that they were using in the 5th grade in Missouri. There are many things I love dearly about the South but the public education system is not one of them. Attitudes toward education in many working class and poor people of color neighborhoods are forgivable as inherited relics of Jim Crow and slavery. Just like many relics, though, the reverence for perception versus the honoring of truth causes all kinds of fucked up situations. Someone pass me an Oreo, I need some comfort food.

Today, however, despite my own experience with being labeled a coconut, after reading an article on the Huffington Post concerning former NPR commentator Juan Williams (who was fired from NPR) making a statement in an Op-Ed for The Hill newspaper calling for the defunding of NPR, I posted the article on Facebook and in my comments on the article I referred to Juan Williams as a coconut. I would like to revise and extend my remarks.

My old high school pal Lara Christley sent me an email asking me if I meant that Juan was brown on the outside, white on the inside. I realized when I got her email that I did mean exactly that but, at the same time, not exactly that at all. What I really meant to say is that Juan Williams is brown on the outside and Republican on the inside. The fact that I conflated whiteness with Republicanism, for me, is one dimensional and problematic in that I know fierce fierce fierce white folks that want not a damn thing to do with Republican politics or the fucked up legacy of ultra conservatism in this country. Yet, while examining my use of the word, I found that I was still comfortable with my word choice.

Ain't that a contradiction.

In my mind, and this I stand behind, Republicans and Republican values AS THEY EXIST TODAY, are what have and continue to drive us directly towards our own doom. Those values and the policies that they have spawned have almost exclusively been championed by white folks and have only been implemented by white folks in power. There has not now nor ever been a majority people of color in any state or federal legislature, and never has there been a critical number of people of color in any of the decision making bodies of the Republican Party or in the various right wing think tanks that have developed the pro-military, anti-choice, anti-democracy, pro-business, anti-working folks, racist, heterosexist, hateful policies that have largely dictated the direction of this country since 1981.

There have been idiotic brown folks that have somehow been so self-hating that they have happily drunk the GOP and fundamentalist Christian Kool-Aid and taken up causes and values that are antithetical to their own well being, insults to their ancestors, and deadly to their progeny, but thank God those crazies have rarely had a national platform to spout their idiocy and give the GOP "examples" of the diversity that they claim exists under their "big tent." Juan Williams, though, does have a national platform and has used it in a way that betrays his own history and throws his own (our) community under the bus....then happily backs up over it.

I am not having it.

I wish there was another word that I had at hand that could communicate my complete and utter disgust with Juan Williams, his statement, and his politics. I wish the word that I chose and used did not lump all white folks into a monolith and perhaps communicate the idea that I believe that all white folks are evil. I obviously do not...I, unlike Juan Williams, am not self hating. If my own Mother was any whiter, you would be able to see the sunlight reflecting off of her skin in deep space. But I can not, will not, and shall not tolerate any person of color that willfully turns his or her back on her community for personal gain. And in the grand lexicon of the people of color experience I can think of no word or phrase, no form of condemnation, and no manner of rejection that is more direct or more final than labeling an individual one of those words that I once so despised (and still do when used against a child whose only sin is that he or she has managed to achieve some level of education in a country and educational system specifically designed to assist them in failing) when hurled at me while playing double dutch.

As a child, the worst insult you could hurl at another black person was coconut. Today, I am making a decision to revive that word but with a new meaning. NO LONGER does coconut mean a black or brown person that "acts white." A coconut is an individual so fucked up and so willing to dismantle the very few (and let's be real, when talking about NPR, very flawed) vehicles for communication and democracy that have not been completely corrupted by corporate America that he or she is willing to walk away from justice and into the arms of the same people that would happily string their ass up, light them on fire and have lunch...if only it were still legal to do so.

In Juan Williams' case...if you crack his ass open....you won't find white skin....you will find Fox News and Rupert's Murdoch's Bitch stamped in place of his spine.

Policing Black Faces

Over my life time, my blackness has been a source of pride and panic. Depending on the geography, the locality, and population, my blackness has been vilified, exoticized, eroticized, ignored, or honored. And, in each of these geographic and temporal localities my own interaction with my own blackness has ranged from struggle to celebration.

My Mom tells the story from when I was around three or four years old. I was in pre-school in the "Projects" in Duluth, MN. Let me be clear that these projects were actually town homes, that had built in play facilities for children, several large green spaces including preserved prairie and a small woodland, and its own early education center for residents. It was very forward thinking for its time, we lived there when it was new, and it is in no way related to the ways in which people of color have been ghettoized in larger cities. The racial make up of these projects were, in fact, largely poor whites with a few black families mixed in and a couple of native families. The setting for this story is important, as one day I came home from school, which was also largely white, though with a prominent minority of people of color, and, though I don't remember this, I was irate. When my Mom asked me what was wrong, I told her that I was angry because I was not white.

That is a hell of a statement for a four year old to make, particularly a four year old that was as light as I was. For my first two or three years in school it was not unusual for me to be the only or one of less than a single handful of students of color in the entire school. In fact, in the 2nd grade, until I moved to Kansas City, Missouri, I was, in fact, one of two people of color in a school of roughly 600 students, and the only other person of color, who was also mixed race, was my cousin. I knew very little about black culture other than what I absorbed through extended family dinners and from my awesome church, Calvary Baptist, that had a black choir that could challenge the glory singing from any church anywhere. But, my day to day reality was largely a white world, an excellent education system, my Mom's white and native family, and, because I was pegged as a "smart kid,": I was often the only person of color in any of my classes.

All of that changed when my Mom fell in love with a man that lived in Kansas City, MO. We packed our bags and moved from one of the whitest places in the United States (Minnesota overall, Duluth for sure) to an entirely black neighborhood in the eastern part of Kansas City, which is largely a working class black community. My Mother was the ONLY white person anywhere in the neighborhood. We didn't know of another family that included a white person for at least six blocks in every direction. My brother and I became good friends with the family three houses down (Sean, Stacy, and Kenya), but their mother, upon finding out that our Mom was white, forbid her children from ever entering our house, and I can remember being inside of their home (beyond the front porch) only one time. In Minnesota, my brother and I stood out because we were black. In Kansas City, we stood out because we were half white. Not only that, we were taunted by the Southern drawling neighborhood kids because of our accent. We were called, "proper," in reference to our usage of the English language, and, though now when looking back on it, I should have accepted it as a compliment instead of an insult, at the time "proper," really meant, "outsider," "white," "siddity," and most hurtful, "not really one of us."

(And thanks to Google Satellite maps, I just saw my old neighborhood for the first time since 1987....hot damn that brings back memories).

The school system in Kansas City didn't really know what to do with me. I remember taking the Iowa Basic Tests in the fourth grade with my hated teacher Ms, Hardy. I asked her, one day on the playground, if the scores had come back. She scowled at me and said, "Yes they did. And you got the highest scores in the grade. But, if there were a way to cheat on this test, I would have assumed you cheated, as you simply aren't smart enough to have scored that high." I hated Ms. Hardy and she hated little boys. I think she was a repressed lesbian, and my heart goes out to her even while I hope her joy hole dried up and fell out at an early age.

The story stayed the same for much of the rest of my educational career. In fact, when I went to high school in Minneapolis, my school was almost 70% black. But, because of my educational achievement, and the fact that I was in the International Baccalaureate program, even the other black kids within the IB program saw me as other, outsider, different.

It wasn't until college that I had a big old FUCK YOU moment and claimed my blackness and the rich heritage of my family. I am unsure of what really tripped my trigger and led me to embrace my blackness deeply. Perhaps it is the trait I inherited from my white Mother wherein if someone tells me no or that I can't, my instinct is to do it, and do it so well, that the I can't becomes "damn you did it." I remember claiming my skin at a job, and thinking of myself, not as dark skinned, but not as particularly light and being told by my darker skinned black co-workers that at best, I was "butter."

The moment that I knew I had arrived home and comfortable with my identity as a black man came with electronically meeting a cousin that lives in Louisiana. She is a lawyer that does free lance research for the West Virginia Historical Society on black families. This brilliant woman, Miss Carol Haynes, has more than 30 notebooks on the history of our family. In fact, unlike most black families, we have a history that goes back to 1709 verified through sales receipts. My great-uncle, Carter G. Woodson, is the Father of Black History Month and founded the oldest (and still published) academic journal for African American studies. It was then, that I knew that no one, no matter how much darker than I am , could take away my identity.

Today, though, I had a conversation with a friend that I deeply love that made me really very sad. I texted a friend of mine from college that now lives here in New York (he moved here several years before I did). My earliest memories of this beautiful man are from visiting his house when he was living with my sister of the heart Jennifer. He was looking through a huge book of pictures of African peoples trying, through deductive reasoning, to see which people he most resembled. Despite the fact that his skin is extremely light, there is no way this man could pass. His features are African and proud without regard to the melanin count in his skin.

I wrote to him today to see if he wanted to go with some friends and me to the Black Out Party on Fire Island. The Black Out party is the queer black party that takes place annually on the island. When I asked him if he wanted to go, he told me that he was over black parties in New York. Then he wrote and said that, basically, he has been rejected and/or treated poorly because of his light skin by queer black communities in New York. And I, due to my personal history, understand that experience viscerally. But I also call bullshit. While I celebrate the fact that black men are intentionally finding darker skinned black men beautiful, and I understand the history wherein light skinned black people were used by whites as a buffer community between dark skinned folks, our experiences, while different based on our individual life paths, are still intrinsically tied together. What I told my friend is that if he chooses not to go for that reason, then he is letting the skin police win. He is black. Period. And he gets to and should claim his space even in the face of rejection. Because, frankly, by him and myself claiming our space, we open the doors to let others claim their blackness. My niece and nephew are only 1/4 black. Anyone that looks at them will NEVER EVER think, gosh these are some black children. Yet their father is darker than I am and obviously black. By standing up for them and by demanding that blackness and history accommodate the truth of my reality, I allow others that share our history and blood to claim their spaces when and if they decide to do so.

It is my hope that he chooses to join us on our trip to Fire Island. He has a place there, whether or not it is ever offered. It is his by right of birth and history.

The Real Meaning of Birthday

In the 3rd grade, I remember a friend of mine, her name was Kim. Every holiday, Kim would park herself in a corner and stare longingly over her shoulder at the rest of the class as we exchanged Valentine's Day gifts, shared birthday cake and cupcakes during a classmate's birthday, opened Christmas treats, and shared Halloween candy. Kim was a Jehovah's Witness and therefore not allowed to celebrate personal or religious holidays with the rest of the class.

One day, Mrs. Rimmer (my favorite teacher...and one hell of a name)...watched Kim's sad face...and finally walked over to her, slammed a piece of cake down on her desk and said, "You don't have to sing the songs, or play the games, or exchange gifts. But you ARE going to eat this piece of chocolate cake!"

Kim's eyes turned as big and round as the cupcakes floating around the room. And with gusto she tore into that cake as if Mrs. Rimmer had just appeared in a burning bush and started issuing commandments.

Nikki Rimmer, once her back was to Kim, broke out into a big smile. She saw me see her smile and she smiled even wider. Winking.

I personally loved Kim because she would warn me on Friday if her Mom and the rest of the Witnesses were planning on marching down our block on Saturday. I would warn my Mom, and I would sit in the living room and wave to Kim as she walked passed with her parents. While my Mom pretended that we weren't at home.

As a kid, I learned that holidays were times for you to get your hands on as much loot as possible (whether the haul be presents or candy). BUT, since I grew up dead broke...I learned that loot was in short supply, so I had better content myself with the love, attention, and adoration of my friends and family.

By the time I was 18, I was throwing my own birthday parties, paying for all the food, and using it as a time for me to bring together the people I love to celebrate them and honor their presence in my life. For the majority of my adult life, I have asked folks to give to a worthy cause instead of buying me presents. Some people still choose to buy me gifts, and I know that for those people it is important to them to honor me with something meaningful. This year, I got a box of GOYA Sazon con Azafran in the mail from my friend Crackity. For us, that was more than just a package of MSG and seasonings...it was a physical reminder of our time living together in Puerto Rico, cooking almost every meal together, wandering around the island, and sharing sex and love war wounds during our time together. Birthdays are a time to celebrate the people you love. And, in doing so, they celebrate you back.

This year was my best birthday ever. There were no wild parties or overly drunken nights. Saturday I cooked and David baked a cake. I was with people I had me that night, met that spring, or met 12 years ago in college in Minnesota. We ate, drank wine, played games, and by 1am folks were gone, I was vomiting a little bit, and then I went to bed happy as a clam. Last night, my actual birthday, I was blessed to have a friend, Nea aka Bebe Benet, from home with me. We met up with my friend yk, Tasha and David joined us, and we were traumatized by the touring performance that included our friend Asha from Atlanta. Afterwards, a new friend, Stacy, joined us for dinner. We ate delicious tapas, laughed our asses off, had a glass of wine, and by 11pm, I was at home and in bed. I spent half of yesterday respondoing to dozens of birthday wishes on Facebook. And I felt loved, celebrated, cared for, honored, and appreciated. And I felt that I had been able to show that some love back to the people I care about that were able to spend part of my birthday with me.

I am lucky. My family has always known and demonstrated that holidays are not about the gifts. It is about the time spent with people you love...nurishing them with good food...and soaking up the love and care to help keep and hold you through the next year of your life.

Thank you to everyone that shared my birthday, this year, with me.