Monday, July 30, 2012

Lesbians Lust for Everything

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

Sometimes I get tired of being the dyke whining out in the godforsaken wilderness, complaining to the cactuses about how lesbians barely make a blip in mainstream culture. Straight men are satisfied with our cameos in porn as two housewives making out with each other until a carpenter or plumber turns up with his big tools. "Women" still shy away from the lavender menace, as if we have nothing to do with them because we only dance around Maypoles in May. (Yes, that was a dick joke).

The LGBT community's often no better. Lately, trans- and gender issues are way more compelling than our own, while G men still use the L word as a punch line, pretty much like they always have. A couple months ago, when blogger Alan Jacobs suggested that gay relationships should "start with the kind of intimacy that is more like friendship than anything else, and to trust that sexual satisfaction will arise from that" noted gay writer Andrew Sullivan's hilarious response was, "On what planet does Jacobs live? Planet lesbian?" BWAH HA HA. What a card. What a douche bag.

It was tempting to blast Sullivan for the sneer in that word, "lesbian." How he embraced the Victorian assumption that two wimmins together never actually screw, or go mad from desire: we just hold hands and simper at each other, making our experience so absolutely foreign to his gay, manly one, we deserve a whole separate planet. But I didn't write anything at the time. I couldn't muster the energy, not when lesbians so often seem to agree.

Last column I dumped on the new Lesbian Political Action Committee, because with all their focus on reproductive rights and women's issues, the most lesbian thing about them was their name. But in fact, lots of young female homos refuse even the name, declaring that they prefer the noncommittal "queer" which is ever so radical and chic. Or even "gay woman," because it sounds more ladylike, and with the "woman" on board, doesn't quite bar the door to men, which we're told is rude and prehistoric, unlikely to advance our careers.

You can hear them worrying about what the neighbors think, as they declare labels conveniently passé, and defend their position so vigorously they give off the sulfuric stench of lesbophobia, afraid the word lesbian will make them small and ridiculous. As if generic humans were so great, so dignified.

I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered the indy girl-on-girl site Autostraddle.com, that doesn't shy away from the word lesbian, and is as comfortable with culture as politics, nestling articles on the endless possibilities of peanut butter up against the realities of dyke life in African countries. Because sometimes lesbians bond over politics, sometimes it's a shared passion for the gooey brown stuff.

Last week, I remembered a different kind of food. Dyke books, dyke art. The kind you get when you remember that labels aren't nooses, but fuses, which can go off with a bang.

First, I read Eileen Myles' novel, "Inferno." What a wonderful, ambitious work. She claimed a mainstay of the literary canon in the name of dykes and poets everywhere, and stuffed it full of her own life, which could have been mine, or yours. I'm an amnesiac, and her story reminded me how growing up in a hetero world I just kind of assumed I was straight even though I mooned after beautiful women, was struck dumb by them. One of her most important themes was that coming out as a dyke, as a lesbian, was as much a leap of imagination as it was a pussy on pussy act.

And Friday I went to Dixon Place to see the show, "Gomez and Tropicana Do Jan Brewer." They turned their two dyke Latina bodies, a smear of lipstick, some cowboy hats and a doll, into the raunchiest, funniest, most irreverent, most obscene performance I've watched in I can't remember how long. They were so fucking daring, so fucking free, being homo and hetero, men and women, white and Hispanic, hell, even goddesses and demon Chupacabra politicians like you'll only see at the Republican National Convention. It boggled the mind.

I sometimes forget that dyke artists exist, leading the way to creating a multiverse inside the boundaries of that terrifying word "lesbian" that we haven't finished with yet. And never will, because that's the thing with identity and language. Words shift. Or the world does. I like it best when we rock it ourselves instead of cowering.

So what if we're shoved to the margins? There are all sorts of interesting things in the folds of couches, jettisoned at the side of the road, in the wilderness. Every one of our lesbian lives redefines the syllables assigned to us. Breaks the mold. Or could. If we weren't so afraid. If we dared to grab it and run.

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