A while ago, Miz Moffat wrote a blog post in which she recounted the celebrity crushes of her youth and how they signified a future queer existence.
I didn’t comment, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this.
I didn’t comment not because I didn’t recognize my young queer self, but because the women to whom I was (and am) attracted are never celebrities: They are simply not visible in pop culture. The butch/genderqueer individuals who make my heart beat faster could not be found on the television screen or in films or even on stage. As I got older and into punk rock, there was some visibility, but before that? Nothing.
In fact, I think this is one of the reasons why I dated men for so long, despite knowing that I was queer: It was difficult to follow through on my hypothetical queerness when I was not attracted to Angelina Jolie or Lucy Lawless or Ani DiFranco or whomever else I heard the gay girls were into. I like ‘em butchy, and that’s a tall order for a young person.
Luckily, I was growing up mostly in Toronto, which is how I knew that I wasn’t straight: Even though the women I liked were rarely on teevee, I frequently saw them walking down the street, working in all sorts of professions, and generally being present. They were always older than me, and looked better in men’s clothing than any boy my age, and I’d see them and think, WOW.
Them I’d go back to fucking my boyfriend or whatever, trying not to dwell on the thoughts and feelings that had been brought up by the encounter.
I’m not saying it was harder than what was experienced by my peers who prefer femmes, just… Different.
I didn’t really recognize myself in a queer community until I was 17 years old and read Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, which is a history of the lesbian culture in Buffalo, NY, in the 1930s-60s. It was a big moment for me, because though the butch/femme roles were presented as a coping mechanism in a homophobic society, I still saw myself validated. Not necessarily as a femme, which is a moniker that I’ve only come to adopt in the past year or so, but definitely as an appreciator of masculine women.
Soon after, I read Rubyfruit Jungle for the first time, and that didn’t help my confusion: The protagonist frequently expresses much distain for her female lovers who maintain their relationships with boyfriends for the sake of appearances, and I wondered, Am I doing that?
I spent a lot if time feeling bad, especially when I was single and secretly in love with a (non-butchy but out queer) friend. I don’t regret the way things went, but of course it’s always easier to see these things in retrospect: It made sense for me to be too scared to come out.
So my celebrity crushes? Well, the closest thing I can think of is when I was slightly obsessed with Amelia Earhart, at the age of 13. Mae Callen summarized the appeal quite well in her tributes, here and here. At the time, I was reading biographies constantly, looking for heroes, which meant that my love for AE had the main hallmarks of my future celeb crushes: I didn’t want to get with her so much as I wanted to BE her. Other people in this category include Diana Rigg in the 1965-68 seasons of the Avengers, and Pam Grier.
Other than that, I can’t say that pop culture has much room for the folks whom I consider to be crush-worthy. That’s a shame, because I know I’m not the only one who finds them to be sexy as all get out. But really, their invisibility is only a facet of the homophobia and strict gender rules that curtail so much of our lives: It’s another side of the same story in which I’m told I don’t look gay. The nature of celebrity reinforces ideas of who we should be, what we should look like, who we should love, and what our standards should be for beauty, of which gender is an extension. In a way, this is part of my attraction to butches/gendequeers: By simply existing and looking jaw-droppingly dapper in her grey wool suit, my lover is a walking/talking/thinking/feeling act of resistance, and I am dead proud to hold her hand as we walk down the street. She’s more crushable to me than any celebrity ever could be.
With huge thanks to Miz Moffat for getting me thinking!
Nomination are currently open for the 2009 Canadian Blog Awards and will close on Saturday, November 21st.
As you may know, the Queer Canada Blogs blogroll is choc full of excellent blogs written by talented bloggers… Now is you chance to show a blogger how much you appreciate their hard work, by entering their name into the running for an award!
Suggested categories include:
- GLBT (Obviously! Though I’m not sure where this puts those of us who identify as queer…)
- Overall
- Blog Post
- Blog Post Series
- Personal
- Family
- Photo/Art
- Humour
- Political
…And these are just the ones for which I’m nominating my favourite blogs!
Check out the full categories listing and fill out the nomination form at the CBA website.
We’re here, we’re queer, we’re taking over teh internets…
I left my desk for a brief jaunt about campus, to grab a coffee at the diner and a new pad of graph paper at the bookstore. The bookstore is having a fundraiser sale of donated books, which I checked out on my way to the stationary section. It was mostly thriller paperbacks and some crappy self-help stuff, but I did manage to pick up a novel by one of my favourite authors, and it’s even one I’ve yet to read: Peter Duck by Arthur Ransome.
I suppose this book is considered a child’s story, one of many in Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series. However, I missed out on this collection when I was a kid, and only got into it a few years ago, at which point I was promptly hooked.
The main characters are a group of (wealthy, white, able-bodied) British children in the 1930s who live the stereotypical life associated with fictional kids in that context: The majority of their year is spent at assorted boarding schools, but they come together in England’s Lake District for the summer (and sometimes winter) holidays. Think of the Narnia books (or maybe Enid Blyton? I’ve only read a few, so am not sure), except that these children are very obsessed with boats and all things nautical. With a host of parents/guardians who are either delightfully permissive or deliciously absent, the friends and siblings that make up the gangs of Swallows and Amazons lead a life of wholesome adventure with the occasional real danger thrown in for good measure.
In today’s parlance, these kids would be nerds: They’re always pursuing some new avenue of interest, from books or convenient adults, usually related to nature, do-it-yourself, and bits of technology that are no longer current and yet still charmingly interesting. Seriously, the novel Pigeon Post had me all dreaming of raising carrier pigeons, and at least half of my knowledge of sailing terminology and techniques comes from these books.
What makes Ransome’s books so worthwhile? For me, aside from the nerd factor, it’s the female characters: The young women in these novels are strong and adventurous and busy doing millions of things that go far beyond the typical care-taking role often given to similar protagonists. Every volume passes the Bechdel test with flying colours, which I feel is especially relevant in books meant for young readers.
What else can I say? Well, it seems that Peter Duck involves a sailing voyage to the Caribbean, and given the era of the novel, I’m guessing that there’s going to be some fucked-up racial stuff in store for my reading (dis)pleasure. But hey, maybe somehow that won’t happen! I can only hope.
As a final note, I just want to tell you that my very favourite Arthur Ransome novel is We Didn’t Mean To Go To Sea, in which the children find themselves sailing unsupervised across the Channel. They rescue a kitten from a shipwreck! ZOMG! It’s amazing!
Also, I recommend The Far-Distant Oxus, which is a novel not by Arthur Ransome but rather two young Swallows and Amazons fans who wrote it while they themselves were attending boarding school. Unfortunately, it has a whole load of crazy Persia-fixated orientalism that I find to be quite gag-worthy and renders the novel unsuitable for unaccompanied minors. However, this could be used as a great way of opening discussions about culture/ethnicity/etc with kids, and it definitely gave me a lot to the think about from a critical standpoint, in terms of how two young British women saw themselves in the colonial context of the mid-1930s. Yes, this is yet another thesis topic, to add to my ever-growing collection.
Finally: Someday I will get a tattoo of the Swallows and Amazons logo, because it is just so damn cool.
for the past two days, i’ve been in an ongoing argument with cowrie, the central character in the journey home/te haerenga kainga by cathie dunsford (spinifex press, 1997; book 2 in a series). i had to return it to the library tonight before i’d finished reading it, but that may have been a good thing because it was driving me to distraction and i need to focus on getting my shit together for the trip home tomorrow.
honestly, i’m not even sure i like the story at all, but there are so many things bothering me about it in so many complex ways that i just can’t forget about it.
this is probably a sign that it’s a good book, actually.
i want to write more, but need to sleep. for now, all i can say is that i have never spent so much time preoccupied by my whiteness EVER (which, if you know me, you’ll realize is a lot). also, i’m kinda starting to get why the old lesbians get riled up when i refer to them as queer.
i just returned from the library with a massive bag of books! hurrah!
homophobic software “bugs” aside, i really do love this electronic age because of how much it simplifies my access to that great analog joy: a paperback novel.
after the incident a couple days ago, i sat down at my computer and did some research. with the glbtq encyclodia’s excellent page on queer literature in australia and new zealand as a starting point, i then explored the offerings at our books (where they even have a facilitated borrowing system! that’s so great!), and finally, went through the listings from spinifex press. every time i came across an author who’d written a novel about australian queer women, i looked her up in wikipedia, and then public library catalogue itself. after an hour, i’d ordered copies of over a dozen books, most of which were available and so immediately sent to the local library branch.
picking them up this afternoon, i felt very triumphant… but this was quickly tempered by a lingering frustration, because i feel like it should be so much easier than this.
i realize that if this were 20 years ago, i’d be damn lucky to even have found these novels in the first place: yes, that’s true, and i’m grateful to those whose activism has preceding mine. but this isn’t 20 years ago, and i’m an uppity queer brat who has taken her liberal environment for granted, and i’m not prepared to settle for a small pile of books that were difficult to track down.
the local library has informational bookmarks recommending novels for fans of joanna trollope (ugh); how hard would it be to do the same for queer fiction?
rant rant rant.
on to the books! here are the contents of my haul:
- cold fever by lyn denison (1998)
- dreams found by lyn denison (2004)
- always and forever by lyn denison (2006)
- working hot by kathleen mary fallon (1989)
- figments of a murder by gillian hanscombe (1995)
- car maintenance, explosives and love ed. by susan hawthorne, cathie dunsford, and susan sayer (1997)
- all that false instruction by kerryn higgs (1975)
- love upon the chopping board by marou izumo and claire maree (2000)
- darkness more visible by finola moorhead (2000)
i cheated a little, because these are by a new zealander:
- the journey home/te haerenga kainga by cathie dunsford (1997)
- manawa toa/heart warrior by cathie dunsford (2000)
- song of the selkies by cathie dunsford (2001)
- ao toa/earth warriors by cathie dunsford (2004)
i also picked up the conversations of cow (1985) by suniti namjoshi because a) it sounds good, b) she used to teach at the university of toronto, and c) she’s published by spinifex and is partners with australian author gillian hanscombe (from the list above), therefore is associated with australia.
plus, one non-fiction to bump up the nerd factor: cyberfeminism: connectivity, critique and creativity (1999) by susan hawthorne and renate klein. i may be away from the internet for the better part of the next two weeks, but i’ll be reading about it.
in case you’d like to continue getting righteously angry regarding the accessibility of queer books through public institutions (or lack thereof), check out this link that julia posted in the comments of my last entry:
in other news, oats arrives tomorrow morning for a 3 week visit and i’m so excited i can barely talk. eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Filed under: Activist, Critic, Feminist, Queer, Reader, Sailor, Scifi Fan, Writer
i like to read. not a shock, i know.
i like to read books from a variety of genres and on variety of topics. in fact, i’ll read just about anything available. when given options, i’m especially fond of science fiction, travelogues by women, non-fiction historical narratives, and how-to manuals.
lately, i’ve been reading about australian history, australian women in antarctica, aboriginal australian experiences, and bike trips in australia, with a harry potter novel thrown in to lighten everything up a bit. with a holiday coming up next week, when i’ll have 12 days away from my computer, i decided that i wanted some good fiction to enjoy at the beach.
so, off to the library.
i went to the fiction section, and was quickly overwhelmed, because it was all ordered by author and i wasn’t in the mood for the long browse that may have been necessary for me to find something appealing.
well, i thought to myself, what do i want to read? i want a novel, i decided, about australian queer women. i would like to have a better idea about the lives of dykes in this country, and anyway, if there’s romance in a novel, it’s easier for me to enjoy it when i don’t have to change too many pronouns in order to identify with a protagonist.
i went to the public computer terminal and entered “lesbian fiction” into the catalogue search field. a new page appeared, with a large black square in the middle: under the image of an exclamation point, it read “oops! you’re not allowed to look at that!”
wtf?
i went back, and tried just “lesbian”.
same result.
maybe it’s under “gay”, i thought… but all that garnered was a ton of results such as under “gay men – health” and “gay men – relationships”, etc etc etc.
i tried “lesbian” again.
this time, the warning message read “if you keep this up, there will be consequences”
consequences?
if by “this”, they meant being queer, then yes, there seems to be a “consequence”: i have to deal with homophobic bullshit from software at the public library.
for a moment, i was at a loss for what to do. on one hand, i wanted to just say FUCK IT, and leave, because i shouldn’t have to out myself in order to find a good book.
but on the other hand, what about the folks coming in to the library who are questioning their sexual identity, or supporting someone who is? they’ll be even less likely to seek out a librarian’s help… i know, because i spent most of my coming out days in the library.
i took a deep breath, calmed my righteous anger and fear, and found a librarian to join me at the computer. as politely as possible, i told her what i wanted and what searches i’d tried. she told me that it was “a bug in the system” for the public catalogue terminals, and tried the same searches, with the same results.
i gave an awkward little laugh and said, “a bug? hmmm… yeah, all i could think was that that’s kinda offensive!”
she tried on her own computer, where there are no blocks (or “bugs”), and said that all she could find were some short stories. i thanked her, and went to get them: it was a collection of contemporary lesbian love stories, all by american and canadian authors.
le sigh.
i returned to the public terminal and searched the catalogue for something by emma donoghue. her novel hood is just about my favourite book, but i’ve missed the rest of her work. happily, i found one of her books. also, a sarah waters novel: i’ve never read anything of hers, but it’s been recommended. in the catalogue, i saw that they also had laurie j. marks’ elemental logic trilogy, which i’m tempted to re-read.
after examining the catalogue some more, i realized that there were no subject tags on any of the fiction listings. this made me feel a bit better, if only because queer novels aren’t the only ones lost in the multitude of themes. however, it also annoyed me, because it is inefficient. what if i was on a real nautical kick, and wanted some sea-going adventures to compliment my love of c.s. forester’s hornblower? how would i find out about patrick o’brian?
that’s a misleading analogy, of course. there is a very big difference between wanting a book about sailors and a book about queers. last time i checked, sailors aren’t being mocked, abused, legally oppressed, or murdered for being who they are.
i believe that fiction plays a vital role for queers learning to accept ourselves. when i was coming to terms with my sexuality, a self-help book on “how to come out” (or whatever) was the last book i’d have taken from the library: it was too forthright and intimidating. but jane rule’s after the fire? that was easy, because the story wasn’t “real”: joining the protagonist on her journey allowed me to explore the concept of my queerness without forcing it into fact before i was ready. through fiction, i could delve into the lives of queer women and become familiar with them at a distance that still felt intimate.
we need queer fiction to counteract the stress of homophobia, which is linked to the over-representation of queers in treatment for depression. for the health of the community, queer fiction needs to be easy to access, and public libraries need to assist with this task. an easy solution is the application of subject headings to all fiction, which increases its relevance to all library users: the sailors as well as the queers.
back to the “bug”. if the public library software won’t allow access to resources associated with a sector of society which is currently struggling for equality in the face of severe oppression, THAT’S MORE THAN A BUG. even if the blockage of results from a search of the word “lesbian” is a coincidence, the results are offensive at best. at worst, they are damaging, because they discourage people from finding help they may desperately need. hell, i’m out and proud, and even i got shaky knees at the prospect of having to ask a librarian for queer books!
my roommate said that a “bug” such as this warrants a sign next to each public computer terminal, which 1) explains that certain valid search words may incorrectly garner a warning, 2) states that the error will be fixed within a given time frame, and 3) directs clients to seek the assistance of a librarian should the error arise.
damn right!
i’m going to go write a looooooooong letter to the head librarian right now.
then, i’m going to use the internet to find some novels about australian queer women.
i had a funny moment this afternoon, where i was suddenly feeling the “why” of my decision to come to australia. there was nothing unusual happening: i was out for a run and had just reached the part of the trail that goes through the gum trees at the corner of the sports field near my house. i suppose it was very beautiful, the landscape i mean, in a dense and urban sort of way. the morning’s fog was just starting to burn off, and there were sun beams coming down through the remaining mist. for that one moment i was simply very much so present, and things felt right.
of course, everything is going quite well… i’ve got a whole bunch of work building a website that i really believe in, my roommates are great folks, i’ve been reading lots, and my lover will be here in 10 days. also, there’s a pot of stew on the stove.
altogether, an excellent celebration of my 200th post on this blog.
The Charles Town Library Society kept its books and maps in a room on Union Street. The keeper of the books sat at a desk at the entrance. He glanced at me quickly and turned away, as if from something distasteful.
“Ah yes, Mr. Lindo,” he said. “I’m afraid we don’t allow Negroes here.”
“Mr. Jackson, don’t you have a brother in the indigo trade?”
The library man carefully closed a book on his desk. “I’m sure nobody will object this one time, Mr. Lindo.”
“Good. We need some books by Voltaire, and your most recent maps of the world.”
The keeper led us to a table at the far end of the room, brought us two of Voltaire’s books and some rolled maps, and left us alone.
“Keep that fan going,” Lindo said.
“He’s not watching.”
“Use it anyway,” he said, “it’s hot in here.”
While I fanned him, Solomon Lindo untied a string around a large scroll.
“I have never seen so many books,” I said, looking around and wishing that women and Negroes were allowed in the library.
“They have a thousand books,” Mr. Lindo muttered, “and I paid for half of them.”
“Where are we?” I asked, pointing at the map.
“This is British North America,” he said, indicating a mass of land.
On the edge of the land, right up against a huge swath of blue named the Atlantic Ocean, Lindo put his finger by a dot, beside which was the name Charles Town.
“And here,” he said, “is Africa.” Across the blue sea, I saw a strangely shaped mass, wider at the top, curving in the middle and narrowing at the bottom.
“How do you know?”
“You can make out the letters if you look carefully. See here? A-F-R-I-C-A.“
“That is my land? Who says it has that strange shape?”
“The cartographers who make the maps. The traders who sail the worlds. The British and the French and the Dutch and the others who go to Africa, sailing up and down the coast, mapping the shape of the continent.”
On the map I paused over some squiggles in the form of baseless triangles. Lindo said they were meant to indicate mountains. I saw a lion and an elephant sketched in the middle of the land called Africa. I saw that it was mostly surrounded by seas. But the map told me nothing of where I came from. Nothing of Bayo, Segu, or the Joliba. Not a single thing that I recognized from my homeland.
“Here on this side of the water, in British North America,” I said, pointing, “it says Charles Town. I can see where we are. But there are no towns written on Africa. Only these places along the water. Cape Verde. Cape Mesurado. Cape Palmas. How are we to know where the villages are?”
“The villages are unknown,” Lindo said.
“I have walked through them. There are people everywhere.”
“They are unknown to the people who made this map. Look here in the corner. It says 1690. This is a copy of a map first made seventy-three years ago. They knew even less back then.”
I felt cheated. Now that I could read so well, I had been excited by the prospect of finding my own village on a map. But there were no villages – not mine or anybody else’s.
“Is there nothing more?” I asked.
Solomon Lindo looked at his watch, and said we had time for one more map.
Mapp of Africa, the second one said, Corrected with the latest and the best observations. I checked the date. 1729. Perhaps it would be better than the first. The map showed land in the shape of a mushroom with the stem shoved to the right. Near the top, I saw the words Desert of Barbary or Zaara, and below that, Negroland, and below that, along the winding, curving coasts, sections named Slave Coast, Gold Coast, Ivory Coast, and Grain Coast. There were tiny words scribbled where the land met the water, but inland was mostly sketchings of elephants, lions, and bare-breasted women. In one corner of the map, I saw a sketch of an African child lying beside a lion under a tree. I had never seen such a ridiculous thing. No child would be foolish enough to sleep with a lion. In another corner of the map, I studied a sketch of a man with a long-tailed animal sitting on his shoulder.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s a monkey,” Lindo said.
This “Mapp of Africa” was not my homeland. It was a white man’s fantasy.
“There is some lack of detail,” Lindo said, “but now you see the shape of Africa.”
I said I had seen enough. After all the books I had read, and all that I had learned about the ways of white people in South Carolina, I now felt, more than ever before, that these people didn’t know me at all. They knew how to bring ships to my land. They knew how to take me from it. But they had no idea at all what my land looked like or who lived there or how we lived.
the book of negroes
lawrence hill
the subtitle to this post is “why the book of negroes should win canada reads“. in the annual competition for top honours in canadian literature, avi lewis (forever loved by those of us in the co-op movement for his film the take, made with naomi klein) is proposing that every canadian needs to read lawrence hill’s the book of negroes because it effectively tells a gripping story that runs contrary to the smugness of how canada countered slavery in the united states as the destination of the underground railroad.
i’m proposing that everyone needs to read this book simply because it demonstrates the way that geography functions as a tool of colonization, power, and oppression.
up the geographers!
>>> vote for your favourite and join the discussion over at the cbc website…
this photo makes more sense if you watch the video, linked below
i exaggerate: i’m not actually legally divorced, because i’ve never exactly been married, per se.
however, i am the veteran of two common-law domestic arrangements that occasioned shared property and health care benefits as well as discussions of formal marriage ceremonies, in one case going so far as to get the license for such recognition. the genders of the people with whom i was involved in each of these two situations were different, but the time and place being what they were, this was not relevant.
or not in a legal sense, anyway… emotionally, that’s another story.
at any rate, i’m no longer legally attached to a partner, but have been so in the past. when each of those relationships ended, my ex(es) and i divided possessions, agreed on the custody of our dependents (cat and dog), and amended assorted paperwork to reflect our situation. we chose to do this: the dissolution of our legal relationship was associated with our decision to end our romantic relationship.
as is rather common throughout the wider heteronormative world, it was our decision to make.
and really? really, i should be able to take this for granted, but instead i feel damn lucky that i was able to make this decision instead of having the state make it for me. if i didn’t live in this province, in this country, in this time period, i could have had the government annulling my marriage based not on the status of my love but instead on my sexual identity.
i don’t think it’s simply my inner-anarchist telling me how crazy that would be.
and yet that’s the reality faced by 18,000 couples living just south of my small island city.
i’m prompted to write about this after reading about the ongoing struggle against proposition 8 in the american state of california, and especially the firsthand experiences of bloggers who have been working for marriage equality. want more info on prop 8? i’m sending you to the No On 8 page over at Lesbian Dad, because even though the author calls it an “unholy mess”, it’s really the best reference i’ve found.
also, check out this video… which had me at hello because i love regina spektor, and then was still making me all weepy on the 27th viewing.
props to amanda for putting this up on her blog ages ago… i’m always late to the party!
…by which i mean, of course, that the items to be given away are definitely great, it’s just that there’s only three of them, and they’re rather pre-loved. also, my dear readers aren’t that numerous, so i doubt the competition will be fierce enough to qualify as “great”.
at any rate…
while perusing my shelves yesterday, i realized that i have two copies of each of the following books, and i’d like to pass the doubles on to new homes. want one? just throw in a comment, and i’ll mail it to you! first three commenters win!
and if this goes well, next week i’m using the same tactic to pawn off the cat and an old couch.
the books are:
