I wanted to play baseball. All throughout my childhood, I would chomp big wads of gum so that it looked like I had chew in my cheeks, and stand on our back porch winding up with snowballs. When we played softball in the fifth grade, Mr. Vokoun let me pitch one time and it became clear that my fantasy of baseball had no relationship to the reality of my aim. I quit, accepting my body couldn’t do the thing I desired of it, a mistake I’ve been guilty of many many times.

For a long time, I didn’t think my body could be femme. Having been, and continuing to be fat, made me feel that I couldn’t be cute or sexy, soft or delicate (which of course, is a narrow definition of femme anyway). I hid my body under baggy jeans and sweatshirts, wore ball caps like it was my job, and grew more and more silent throughout high school and into college. Before I came out as queer, I remember having multiple discussions with my friends and mentors about gender presentations, conversations in which I routinely insisted I was more butch than femme. Turns out, femme and butch aren’t opposites and don’t exist on a binary. Turns out I can be hella femme, a fact I indulged and delighted in this past August at the 2008 Femme Conference, when I got a glimpse of what femme could be, and what a femme community could entail. It’s exciting but new: a place where I’m hoping to find comfort and support, while at the same time challenging my own assumptions and moving past damaged and constructed notions of bodies and butches, fatness and femme-ininity.

I never did take up baseball but I’m more than a little committed to making sense of this queer identity. So thank you, thank you to the Femme’s Guide for giving me the space to do so. I’m looking forward to many fabulous femme times ahead.