queerer and queerer
Last weekend I ended up at LA's 10th annual Dyke Day, a celebration of queer love and family that mostly involved, for my part, lying on a blanket drinking mezcal bloody Marys and making up for my days in New York by getting plenty of sun. I was there with C & A & a bunch of their friends, the token straight girl in the bunch ("you can pass though," C told me, "you have gray hair and visible tattoos.").
At one point I said to C, "I know this is a problematic sentence, but I think you'll understand what I mean when I say I wish I was a lesbian right now."
Only one of you reading this is C, so I will clarify that I knew she'd know that I did not mean dating girls would be sooooo much easier or being a lesbian seems like a cool style choice or anything other than: I wish my sexuality felt like something that was part of a conscious community, and worthy of celebration.
I totally understand that the need to celebrate comes in part from the continued degradation and oppression of queer folks, and that the need to gather grows out of a history of being scattered, marginalized and silenced. I don't want any of that for myself (or my friends, or anyone, for that matter).
But that didn't change what it felt like to sit in that park and think, straight people never do this for ourselves, or for each other. Straightness is a cultural default, so omnipresent that we barely have language to talk about it. (This is water, etc.) What would our lives look like if we actually took time to acknowledge that we, too, are particular and strange? If we celebrated the ways in which we're capable of loving each other? That our desire is rare and terrifying and something to be proud of, too? I don't mean a straight pride parade. I mean a re-imagining of straightness. I mean, imagining straightness at all, instead of just swimming it all the time.
"That's the thing about being a straight woman," C said. "You're not niche. You're just second." I'm still thinking about that: what it means when you can't opt out of desire that continually oppresses you. What it would look like if straight people understood ourselves as one community among many, and tried to take care of each other the way that other communities do.
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People keep calling GRACE AND THE FEVER a queer novel, and I don't know how to feel about that. Another thing C said: "it's about straight people interacting with queerness," which I think is true, and fair, and important. I just also want to be clear that I'm not claiming the term for myself or the book as an identity. I mean, if queerness, both in terms of gender and sexuality, is a spectrum, then ever straight cis girls like me are on it, and the book certainly aims to be actively queer, opposed to binaries and interested instead in shifting perspectives. But what it does is not what it is. I am always interested in queering. In terms of how I live in the world, it still doesn't make me queer.
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In case you didn't click the links above, one is to a new piece about me and GRACE, which Crissy Milzao wrote for GOOD. Speaking of straightness:
At one point I said to C, "I know this is a problematic sentence, but I think you'll understand what I mean when I say I wish I was a lesbian right now."
Only one of you reading this is C, so I will clarify that I knew she'd know that I did not mean dating girls would be sooooo much easier or being a lesbian seems like a cool style choice or anything other than: I wish my sexuality felt like something that was part of a conscious community, and worthy of celebration.
I totally understand that the need to celebrate comes in part from the continued degradation and oppression of queer folks, and that the need to gather grows out of a history of being scattered, marginalized and silenced. I don't want any of that for myself (or my friends, or anyone, for that matter).
But that didn't change what it felt like to sit in that park and think, straight people never do this for ourselves, or for each other. Straightness is a cultural default, so omnipresent that we barely have language to talk about it. (This is water, etc.) What would our lives look like if we actually took time to acknowledge that we, too, are particular and strange? If we celebrated the ways in which we're capable of loving each other? That our desire is rare and terrifying and something to be proud of, too? I don't mean a straight pride parade. I mean a re-imagining of straightness. I mean, imagining straightness at all, instead of just swimming it all the time.
"That's the thing about being a straight woman," C said. "You're not niche. You're just second." I'm still thinking about that: what it means when you can't opt out of desire that continually oppresses you. What it would look like if straight people understood ourselves as one community among many, and tried to take care of each other the way that other communities do.
-
People keep calling GRACE AND THE FEVER a queer novel, and I don't know how to feel about that. Another thing C said: "it's about straight people interacting with queerness," which I think is true, and fair, and important. I just also want to be clear that I'm not claiming the term for myself or the book as an identity. I mean, if queerness, both in terms of gender and sexuality, is a spectrum, then ever straight cis girls like me are on it, and the book certainly aims to be actively queer, opposed to binaries and interested instead in shifting perspectives. But what it does is not what it is. I am always interested in queering. In terms of how I live in the world, it still doesn't make me queer.
-
In case you didn't click the links above, one is to a new piece about me and GRACE, which Crissy Milzao wrote for GOOD. Speaking of straightness:
For Romanoff, the innocuous thirst of boy band fans was an access point for a larger conversation. “One of the things I think is interesting about it is the idea that there's not a real cultural conversation around what it feels like to desire men's bodies,” explains Romanoff. “We don't have an accepted vocabulary for talking about that kind of stuff, like, ‘Are you a breast man or an ass man?’ Right? Like no one's ever asked me, ‘Are you a shoulders man or a forearms man?’ You know? I've had to develop that vocabulary!”
And I wrote about the gendered muse double standard through the lens of I Love Dick and Taylor Swift and Harry Styles and Townes Adair Jones for The Washington Post. Did you know that my college ex once wrote a play about us and showed it to our friends but flipped out when I asked to be allowed to read it? Being someone's muse fucking blows!!!!
Also probably I'm going to write more about this at some point but I had to hold my breath the first time I listened to Lorde's Writer in the Dark because it felt so particularly poignant to me to imagine girls growing up with someone growling in their headphones, "sorry I was never good like you / stood on my chest and kept me down / hated hearing my name on the lips of a crowd / did my best to exist just for you / bet you rue the day you kissed the writer in the dark." It's the thing I can't help loving about TSwift, too, the way you can feel her fury rising up sometimes. You will not to tell me how it was. I will tell you what it was like for me, and I will be unflinching, and I will be unsparing. One of Swift's versions: "oh I could go on and on / and on and on / and I will." I thought about getting it as a tattoo for a little while. On and on and on and on. And I will.
ANYWAY also the planet is burning, so for Racked I talked to a company making natural indigo dye that will help us buy jeans that aren't extremely toxic. It doesn't feel like enough on a morning when cops and rapists are being given their power back, but it's all I've got for you for now.
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