in which we talk acrylics and politics.
I decided to take a portrait-painting intensive class this fall: ten sessions of five hours each painting the human face in acrylic. This isn’t the kind of art I usually do. I do stylized, colorful watercolors, illustrations of fantastical places and fantastical people, so it was with some trepidation that I showed up with my bag of acrylics and bristle brushes.
The class started with sketches of Roman portrait busts, then moved onto a more technically and emotionally challenging subject in the second class. We each were giving a wavering plastic mirror and instructed to do a portrait of our own face using just black and white paint.
One of my classmates politely refused and instead painted another idealized bust she found in the supply cupboard. It turns out that it can be very hard to stare at your own face for hours, especially if you are the sort of person who has been socialized to catalogue every flaw of your own appearance. I suspect if I had been given this exercise in grad school, the nadir of my self-regard, I would have come away nauseated and ashamed of my snub nose, my round chin, and my fleshy cheeks. Then, I felt as though correcting the way I looked — through clothes, makeup, dieting, dishonest photography, whatever — was something I owed to the people around me.
The next week of my painting class, we repeated the self portrait exercise. This time around, the image I produced was closer to how I really look; the first week I had made my nose longer and my top lip a bit shorter than they really are. I also got closer to accurately representing my undercut, a hairstyle that I love for its convenience and flare but which puts me at a certain distance from conventional notions of femininity. The process of picking out the contours of the muscles which move my mouth and my eyebrows satisfied some urge to understand the underpinnings of reality, or at least my small corner of it.
The fourth week we were finally given the go-ahead to work with color, and our teacher suggested we use a limited palette of white, black, burnt sienna, and yellow ochre. My face in real life is quite red, so I was astonished that this combination of colors was enough to approximate the real tones and texture of my features. This painting is maybe a little less my exact replica, but gets more at my personality; I am making this facial expression about 60% of my waking hours.
There is something very curious about the act of making a self-portrait. One might start out harshly critical of one’s features, comparing them to one’s more beautiful friends and acquaintances and every magazine one has ever had the misfortune to glance through, but after an hour of staring in the mirror those features start to lose meaning, transforming into adjacent planes of light and dark. One might even find that it’s hard to distinguish the edges of one’s face from one’s hair or shirt or the background; a face becomes part of the larger landscape, something to be observed rather than optimized.
Accurately painting what the mirror shows is a meditation on withholding judgment, of not letting what you think you ought to be seeing stand in the way of what you see. For me the exercise requires a sort of radical acceptance, letting my face be what it is, rather than what I have been told it ought to be.
The last time the country’s political landscape looked like in does now, in 2016, I was overwhelmed with terror, possibly because I had just started to see who I was without who I ought to be scrambling the image.
What I wanted to be: easy to love and easy to respect. Conventionally beautiful, fashionable, unchallenging.
What I was, and am: a lot of things that many people find very difficult to love and respect indeed. I am an extremely average-looking person, who does not easily perform any particular gender; I wear clothes that fit me, which means I am often addressed as “sir” at work.
And inside? I know that I am attracted to men, women, and people who are neither. I understand myself as a person without a gender. I’m not pierced to the soul when someone assumes that I’m a woman, because I live in community and in history with women, but I also know in my gut that the assumption is wrong.
But even before I could let myself see myself clearly, when even the knowledge of myself felt too ugly and dangerous to face, I found myself most often in queer communities with queer people, because those are the places where I found compassion and interest in my many strangenesses, rather than revulsion. And because of this, I am a person who loves a lot of other queer people, including a lot of trans people and trans women in particular: people who have taken full ownership of their own bodies.
I skipped my portrait-painting class last week, because I was still feeling exhausted and unwell after Tuesday’s election. I am tired, but I am not feeling the same kind of despair I felt in 2016, because whether despair is warranted or not, the act of looking at myself and being honest about what I see there doesn’t hurt like it used to. I live in a different state with politics that better reflect my values, I have a lot of local friends who care about changing the world for the better, and I work in a place with a huge diversity of employees, customers, languages, and life experiences.
The books I write are mostly fantastical, but they are real reflections of whom I am and what I believe as a person. Not only that, but I have had the great privilege of experiencing other people’s queer, gorgeous art full of imaginative possibilities — from shapechanging (The Scandalous Letters of V & J) to transhumanism (The Transitive Properties of Cheese) to simply surviving in the beauty and hostility of the world as it exists (How We Fight For Our Lives).
Sometimes I think about what it would have been like to find these books in college, in grad school, and hear these voices telling me: you get to be honest. You get to let your external self reflect who you are inside, however confusing and complex that is to decipher.
Stories in which we see ourselves matter, but stories where we see each other are just as important. I need to know that there are other people out there, leading widely different lives, using different idioms, grieving different sorrows, celebrating different joys. I need to know that the world can be different because it has been different and it is different, right now, for so many people and in so many places — both worse and better than it is for me right here in this place and time. Humans are infinitely varied, infinitely adaptable, infinitely capable of learning, and that is our glory. Any doctrine which asserts that there is one correct way to be a person is necessarily a lie, and probably a vicious one.
So there was an election on Tuesday! And the United States apparently would prefer the guy who has stated in word and deed that he hates trans folks and people of color, repeatedly, aggressively; a guy who has openly lied about trans people and immigrants, making them sound scary, disgusting, a reasonable target of aggression. And this guy has allied himself with a lot of people who are doing their damnedest to remove books with any kind of queer content or honest history from schools, libraries, publishing in general. Perhaps you can understand my concern not only as an author, but as a human who exists in the world, who is part of queer and trans communities, who would like to be free to move through the world without pretending to be someone I’m not, who would like my friends to be safe and protected no matter where they travel.
I want everyone to have access to the same stories that have delighted and comforted me, the stories that have made me feel grateful to be alive right now. I want those stories to be preserved for posterity, to be passed back and forth, from hand to hand and person to person.
And so.
Starting this month, I am going to be running a giveaway of physical queer books through this newsletter. I’m choosing books which I have read and loved recently, with a preference for authors working right now. For this first round, I’m starting with three copies of RB Lemberg’s The Four Profound Weaves, which is about two old trans people trekking through the desert to face a tyrant who has been in power for decades. Lemberg’s prose and worldbuilding are gorgeous; this book takes place in a world where weaving begets physical transformation and birds carry souls to and from the physical world. This book also delves deep into how difficult inheritance can be; our ancestors both give us the tools to build our lives and the hobbles that keep us from building them authentically.
FINALLY. The instructions! If you would like to enter the giveaway, please fill out this Google form. All questions are required, because we are in a bot-filled internet landscape. In three weeks (December 4th!) I will use a random number generator to pick the winner from the entrants and email asking for their physical mailing address at that time. I will mail the books the week after the drawing.
We’ll see how well this process works, and if there are any weird hiccups I’ll adjust for December’s givewaway.
Let us enter the next four years in the spirit of finding our authentic selves and developing a discipline of hope.
Sharon