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Being back from tour requires a kind of re-entry –it’s, yes, a bumpy ride. I can’t wait to tell you all about these last 10 days on the road in the Southeast with Body Heat!
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A gorgeous ERC last night! There was cuckolding & an orgy & the truth about strapping on in the stories that folks read, plus so much more. Hot hot stories, tender stories, revelations, wantings, loss, fear, ache, plaster. Honest. We meet every fourth Wednesday of the month at the Center for Sex and Culture for the Erotic Reading Circle, and I’d love to see you out sometime soon!
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I don’t have a lot of time to blog this morning because I’ve been notebooking (well, journaling into the computer, which has gotten easier over time, with practice, more like handwriting into my spiral-bound notebook) about shame. Femme shame, in particular. Internalized femme shame, somehow distinct from internalized misogyny, the stuff inside that calls me stupid, ridiculous, craven, painted, slutty (and more, and worse, though all that is really bad enough) for wanting to be a visible girl, a feminine woman, someone with curves, shape, adornment, someone desirable. Particularly desirable, in my case, to butches (and yes, babe, to a particular butch), from whom I am so very different in presentation. Do you know what I mean? I mean the stuff that says, when my feet ache after 6 hours on a plane because I’m wearing tight tall peep-toe heels instead of flip flops or sneakers, What in the hell is the matter with you? You’re breaking yourself just because you want hir to find you sexy? Because my answer is yes. And because I want the girls to find me sexy, too.
At the end of my writing this morning, I thought, I need to spend more time with, create more time for, my femme friends at home. On tour, we get to admire one another 24-7, we get to make admiring comments about one another’s just about everything. And we get to talk honestly, ask honest questions about Do you really think this looks good? How can I make this piece of clothing work? What do you mean I can wear skinny jeans? We did that with each other this tour, got so honest with it, got to offer up to one another the particular cadences of our own places of shame (well, let me not name that for others — at least, I know this is true for me), and here these women who I so admire and can get jealous of for their confidence, their style, their power, they met these tender places with care, a kind of cradling,
And that’s one of the reasons I love Tour, and why I crash when it’s over. Yesterday I wore a short skirt, tall boots, flowy shirt, to work, and not one person exclaimed. Yes, that sounds ridiculous, but the fact is that, on tour, we get to be one another’s cheering sections, we get to be the people who go gaga for one another, we get to gush with a particularly (I’ll say it) femme desire, pushing one another up and up as we admire and adore one another. And when it’s over, I miss it — not from a vanity place, no, but from a connection place; it’s not a safe thing we’re doing in the world, being visible girls/feminine women, and it’s necessary to surround ourselves with the voices of those who adore us, and whom, too, we can adore right back, who tell us that yes, we are right to want to claim our beauty, our gorgeousness, our ferocity. So yes, I miss it when tour is over and I move back into silence, back onto the concrete streets where women are trained not to make eye contact with one another, where the butches slide their eyes away from me, where the eye contact I can make is with men who just want to offer something lewd — moving back from open roads, thick green encampments surrounding us, daring conversation, owning my own artistry to these silent grey carpeted cubes, the hum of fluorescent lights, the tick of keys beneath my fingers pus(h)ing out dry database requests instead of conversations about desire, something stickier, something wet.
There’s more to say about all this, but I need to get ready for work. Still, here’s a call to my local femme friends: let’s get together soon, ok? I need you.
And yes, a write, a possible write: what’s the name of the shame you or your character are wrangling with right now? Want to take a few minutes, 10 or 15, and let yourself find some words for its shape? Do you see it connected to other shames, or as the flipside to some other feeling/desire?
Your words are so important, and I’m so grateful for them, for you, for you, for you.
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