now, negotiating my femme self, and my queer self, in this situation is something that has been difficult in ways that are at times crushing and at times very freeing.  certainly not having a community present makes things more difficult because there are very few places i feel that i am accepted and recognized as a queer femme.  however, more than this, i have found that the community i *do* have has a really hard time negotiating my relationship and my identity, to the point of people (some I know, some I don’t) questioning my queer femme identity.

now from some people i expected this.  i’ve been out as queer to my family since i was 16 and this is the first straight person i’ve ever dated (of any gender).
my grandparents: so happy! (he’s catholic, but you know, no one’s perfect).
my parents: while not as openly jubilant, it was the first time anyone i’ve dated has been invited to spend holidays with us.  i don’t think they’ve made such an effort to like someone i’m dating since… well, ever.  i always thought they’d be glad i’d never get pregnant on accident (like they did) but apparently birth control and potential abortions are far less scary than diesel dykes.

but from some people in my community in which queer has always meant “do it loud and with glitter” i have found a certain amount of resistance.
ok, not resistance.  outright non-acceptance of both me and my partner.  I’m not sure if it’s because my partner is straight, if it’s because he doesn’t speak fluent English, if it’s because we live so far away that daily or even weekly familiarity with our relationship isn’t possible, or if it’s simply because there’s no gossip like queer femme actually  (gasp) dating a straight guy.  maybe it’s all of this or maybe it’s none.  I’m honestly not sure.

i do know i should have seen this coming.  i have seen bisexual folks treated like the bastard at a family reunion enough times to know that, for some in the big gay rainbow, anything resembling or approaching bi = traitor, confused, trying-to-pass, newly out, etc.  ironically, all things i have heard said about femmes (in general) as well.  but i can’t speak to a bi-femme experience, i only realise now what a lot more i’ve got to learn as a queer femme experiencing what i’m sure is only small slice of bi-hating-heaven.  not only because of the relationship i’m in myself, but also in general: in the past i was *so* sure i would never date a person that would call my queerness into question that i think i allowed myself to largely pay lip service (instead of real, concentrated thought and respect) to the experiences i heard bi folks talking about.

the frailties of youth.  maybe i thought, well, i’m not bi, i’m queer, and i’ve always said love comes from where it comes.  i was, i admit, thinking that might be more in the way of me falling for a femme than a straight man, but what can you do?  the fact is, when someone lights you up and makes you feel like your heart can grow wings and trail fairy dust, you don’t ignore that (or i don’t, anyway).  likely it was my own way of trying to protect myself, too, from a lot of bi-phobia that is always around.  i admit i was never really an outspoken defender of bi-femmes in the past, and that is something i regret and have changed.

now, i said that in reference to bi-femmes and this is where i get to my real point.  i have known a few butches and many trans men who admit to being bisexual or queer in a way that encompasses straight folks as well.  moreover, in conversations about theoretical situations i have heard more than one person, more than one femme, state unabashedly that a butch and a straight man would always be a queer relationship, because the butch would (visibly?) queer it.  a trans guy dating a straight girl, these same people say, could be queer if the trans guy was queer, or straight if he’s straight id-ed too.  maybe people assume that a straight man dating a butch person or a trans masculine person would HAVE to be a more accepting straight person to be–what?  attracted in the first place?  i’m not sure, but i know there is a key in what we assume about the appearance and appeal of femmes, and the resulting interaction with the straight world.

…which leads me to question where any of that leaves a femme (any femme) who is in a relationship with a straight person.  if a butch or a trans man automatically queers a relationship, why are femmes so easily considered straight-acting?  why is it always implied that, because we are femme, we are also clearly not out in our relationships and to the world, no matter who our partner is? moreover, isn’t that playing into the same old bullshit that a lot of femmes get about trying to pass, not ‘looking’ queer or gay or lesbian or… enough?  yes, there is something to be said for the politics of “passing”, even when it is unintentional.  but what about how we act?  is a “visibly queer” person inherently more likely to be out in their words and actions?  or is appearance the full sum of our parts? to assume that my femme-ness makes me likely to cheerfully slide into a nice straight role in nice, straight relationship is both hysterical and wildly misguided, and I know I’m not the only femme that’s true of.

on the other end of the spectrum, if a femme is made “straight” in a relationship with a straight man, shouldn’t the same be true if anyone, femme/butch/trans/none-or-all-of-the-above dates a straight person? i think it is fair to say that a large majority of the butches and trans-masculine people i know have messed around with straight women.  so, if a straight man makes me and my relationship ‘straight’, shouldn’t a straight person do the same to those who date them, of whatever gender?  is that the power of straight folks, that they magically convert whoever dates them into the same thing?

of course not.

and believing that is, in reality, policing someone else’s identity by making it dependent on the opinion of others.  ever been told “it’s just a phase” or “you haven’t met the right ____ yet”?
yeah, exactly.

moreover it’s unfair to say that anyone dating a straight person in a gender combination that is normally considered a heterosexual relationship is therefore IN a heterosexual relationship.  in my opinion, if one person identifies as queer (or bi or lesbian or gay or… etc), the relationship is not straight.  maybe it’s not queer either, but it’s sure as hell not fair for anyone outside of the relationship to decide either way.

in the end, i’m not even sure what the end is.  bi-phobia, phobia of lgbq (etc.) people dating straight people, fear of losing community, fear in general is rampant in our communities (some more than others).  and, while i have few answers or solutions, i think what it comes down to from my femme perspective is this: femmes are constantly fighting against being defined, valued, recognized, honored or ignored based on who they are with. i would think, because of that, femmes should be able to recognize that of the many femme identities and possibilities that exist, none of us should be making rigid definitions based on who we date.  ideally, we should be honoring femme identities, and trying to understand rather than judge from fear.

after all, maybe you’ll never date a straight man, or maybe you’ll fall in love with one tomorrow.  maybe you’ll wake up one day and realise your partner has become one, maybe you’ll wake up one day and realise you’ve become one.  maybe you date straight women who refuse to be out about your relationship, maybe you’ve only ever dated lesbian nation, lambda-earring-wearing, separatist-community-living, womyn-lovin-womyn.  you still get to define your own identity, you still decide what femme means to you, how you live it and how you love it.  and no relationship can take that away, or change you just out of the capricious behavior of relationships.

femme, to me, has always meant freedom.  and that means free to have your femme identity recognized, honored and upheld, even if you reinvent it every day.  femme is who we are, completely ourselves, and nothing less.

but friday i added a new one to my list: how to deal with scorpions.

perhaps i should back up to say this: i am not generally afraid of bugs.  if it’s not stuck in my hair, i have no issue.  i’m not what i would call particularly outdoorsy, but fear of the wild and many-sectioned is not accurate either.  anyway, i take a certain amount of femme pride in dealing with things on my own, bugs or otherwise.  you call on your butch friends to kill every cockroach and pretty soon they think you’re doing it because you CAN’T and not because you got tired of disinfecting your shoes in the tub post-encounter.

but here, i have been the Chosen One for plagues of little and large many-legged and winged bastards.  a neon orange moth literally the size of my hand?  flew at my head repeatedly.  i’m surprised it still had capacity to fly since supposedly if you touch the damn things their wings are too fragile to go on flying.  not so this one, my friends, no no.  i admit, had it been blue instead of orange (a color i detest) i might have found the whole thing more agreeable, but that’s a color-conscious femme for you.

on the list of other Bug Incidents:
feet attacked by giant red ants?  check.  i think they were after my red toenails in a sense of camaraderie or something.
cicada-like bugs falling on my head in the outhouse?  check.  twice.
grossly poisonous spiders in the shower and above the bed?  check.
earwig-like-creatures in my heels?  check (and killed with the same heel as poetic justice).
some strange swimming bug in the water i use to wash my clothes?  check.
some strange running bug in my bed during the summer?  check a few times.  that little thing was FAST…
…and you get the point.  bugs and me: not usually good friends, no matter how much they enjoy tormenting greeting me, but not usually a serious problem.

and then comes friday.  i’m cooking dinner while my sweety does dishes, all is fine, until all of a sudden he started yelling in obvious pain.
now, i assumed this was a matter of getting cut by stray knives or something in an over-crowded sink.  but that, i guess, would be too simple for a bug attractor like myself.

no, it was a scorpion.
a scorpion that had crawled up our pipes to the kitchen sink during the (warm) day we had no water.  and it was just hanging out there, waiting, and then stung my sweety’s hand.

now, like anyone who has no experience with scorpions i know only that the smaller the more poisonous.  and you know, they should only be living in a warm place (like desert warm, not a city where, when it reaches 90, everyone’s ready to go in for the day and sleep because it never gets that hot here).

but here was a wee scorpion (about the size of my thumb) that had not only stung my sweety, it was now trying to look inconspicuous on the kitchen floor.
i got a screwdriver from my tool bag and killed it.  i wanted to just crush it with my big high heels, like i imagined really Good Femmes do, but then we couldn’t show it to the doctor.  and let’s be real, while i’ve been known to stomp cockroaches with my heels (hello nyc, thats half the reason you BUY the high heel boots), i didn’t really want to have to then scrape scorpion off my boots.  instead, i put it in little paper envelope and took scorpion and sweety to the emergency room.

an injection and some meds later, we returned home.  apparently the scorpions around here, while poisonous and painful, are not *too* poisonous, and you could get away with peeing on the sting (i dont know why, the ammonia in pee maybe?) and not need hydrocortizone.  which is good to know, i suppose, should another little scorpion with too much chutzpa decide to visit.

though, honestly, if it does, i’m going to designate my red heels the Crushers and stomp away.  it is far too much stress for me, thinking about scorpions every time i want to do the dishes.  i already have enough bug-related things to negotiate and the stress gives me a tendency to pick away at my nail polish, which, once the stressful situation is over, really makes annoying femme OCD kick in (for me, having chipped polish even in winter, when all i wear is boots, is a problem.  i still take my socks off SOMEtimes…)  but that is a whole other story…

I think it was the brazenness she picked up on anyway.  today I’m decked out in red and black.  red cowboy boots, matching red bracelets lining my arm, big rings and low cut shirt that shows off just the right amount of cleavage, a bird taking flight from my collar bone in a sea of coppery red.  not exactly standard issue around here.

of course, the best femme accessory I have is my walk: decidedly not standard issue anywhere.  the way I move is what I consider the most noticeable part of my femme attire: a confident, not-hurried-but-I’m-going-somewhere, swing-the-hips-my-bubbe-gave-me, don’t-fuck-with-what-you-can’t-understand, swagger.  it is also what most frequently gets me into trouble.  coming or going, a confident walk garners more commentary than all the fabulous skirts and flashy heels in the world.

it is also what earns me the most looks of shielded or not-so-shielded disdain from women in this town, along with observations far more direct than the whistles and stares of men.

but the truth is, on some level I appreciate it. yes, it would make every day worlds better if I did not have to do self check-ins every morning against the clothes I choose to make sure I have the brain space to deal with all the attention I don’t want (I don’t always).  certainly I would prefer a world in which I could be femme as I am and also easily read as the queermo I am.  but if I can’t have the visibility I want as I want it, I can at least distinguish myself in some ways. “not normal” is better than “average” and as a femme I have always reveled in all the ways I can distinguish myself simply by being comfortable in myself.

honestly, when I moved here from NYC almost a year ago, I didn’t think I could feel much more invisible.  I carry few of the markers that butches and queers claim to look for to distinguish femmes: no tattoos, long (perhaps boring) hair, a personal abhorrence for rainbows.  I have piercing, but that is hardly a distinguishing marker these days.  I fancy my attitude and presence altogether telling of the fierce, hussy femme I am, but that does not appear to be a shared sentiment among the homos I pass on the streets, in the subway, even at meetings and trainings at queer organizations (oh!  how nice to have an ally here…)

i used to lament all of this with my femme friends at great length, but now i have passed through to a whole new realm of invisibility that makes my old, where-are-all-the-butches-who-appreciate-high-heels-and-lace laments seem laughable.  my darlings, I did not know what I had.  got ignored by butches at a gay bar?  at least there were butches and gay bars!

now, why a fierce, hussy femme would move from NYC to a small, conservative town in southern Mexico is of little importance.  call it an overdeveloped and desperate need for change (it was my 15th move in 4 years), but here i am.  what was not apparent to me, in the two months i took to transition from decision to reality, was how much of my identity would be, suddenly, erased from view.

I am a queer femme of course.  but also a feminist, a Jew, a community and labor organizer, a sex educator, an actress, a writer, leather and motorcycle fiend, an occasional sex worker.  I’m committed to anti-oppression organizing as a way of life, I believe theory is useless without practice, I challenge and expect challenges in return, I’m political and engaged.  I’m sex-positive, independent, working class and proud…  and if I didn’t advertise all of this every place I went while living in the US, I was also not ashamed or closeted about any of them, either.  like I said, brazenness is part of my so-called charm: you ask, we answer.

since moving here, though, things have changed.  it’s not that I have shed my shameless self, but now, I am careful.  I am now finding new ways to negotiate invisibility and self.  it’s the oldest femme game and now I find myself connecting it even more to the stories my bubbe has told me being “too Jewish and too loud”,  of being too ethnic or too ambitious or too passionate or too free.  here, I am dancing on the razor blade not only of sexuality, gender and expression, but also of religion, work, philosophy, rights, way of life.

when I talk loud, laugh out from the belly, I know I am sometimes seen as a loud gringa.  when I first moved here, I did all I could to curtail those impulses, to not be like one of those damned spring break types.  but, with time, I realized that wasn’t being fair to myself.  I’m a respectful, bi-lingual, loud-laughing person.  belly laughs are not the same as being an entitled, drunk, unthinking (la tipica) American.  shameless is not inherently the same as rude.

moreover, laughing loud, talking direct and with honesty is something I associate with almost all the admirable women I’ve ever known.  I am not going to shave that off in exchange for ‘women are to be seen and not heard’.  honey has things to say, you know?

the same happens when I talk about the jobs I used to do, the things I know and do.  like so many before, I applied for a job working at a vidrieria, working with glass and wood.  I was offered a secretarial position despite my experience in building and proficiency in more tools than the workshop contained.  later I found myself teaching some of the workers the right way to use L-brackets (they go under, not over) and quit shortly after.  a person has limits and my arguments with the boss lady to actually use my skills were unappreciated.  she didn’t believe I could possibly know what I was doing.

so I started to tell people about what i used to do: lead protests in big NYC hotels, for grocery workers in Arizona, for queers in Oregon, queer youth across the country, people living with HIV and AIDS in Boston.  the fact that I have ever done more than be a secretary or waitress is never asked about.  and, while it makes me uncomfortable to volunteer too much information about my past to anyone I don’t know, I have learned to, as another way to stay true to myself.  there is so much more to this complicated mess than what a person sees standing in front of them on any given day.

of course, there are struggles—this femme is not tefflon.  many days I wonder what the fuck I’m doing here, so far from family, from a place where, at least if I’m not always seen as femme, I’m seen as some of the parts of who I am.

but there’s always hope.  getting called a whore in the street wasn’t exactly the effect I was going for when I got dressed this morning, but when my gay bf calls me fierce I know at least someone gets it.  if no one understands what “Jewish” means, it is a chance to think about how I embody it, how I explain it, how I practice and who I invite in to see.  if I’m a marked feminist in a place where that is overwhelmingly a damning word, well, that’s nothing new.  there is a certain comfort in being reviled for something so infinitely yourself.  and if I’m femme in a place where “gay” is hardly spoken, at least I am still able to find ways to be flamboyantly me, myself complete.

I walk too freely to claim my body as my own. I am direct and empowered in my speech and actions, in my opinions, in my appearance, in my desires to do something very femme indeed: explore who I am and project whatever that is today into the world with as much strength and truth as I can.  and if I sometimes get called whore on the street, at least I am unrepentantly and shamelessly me.