on being "brought out" [anniversary reflections]

It's been roughly five years since Hanna and I started snogging one another.

And, well, other things. It all happened in a bit of a rush; I never was a very patient person once I'd finally determined it was time to do something new. And for us, apparently, the time for sexytimes was late June 2009. 

So yay anniversary!

(via)

This weekend I was reading The Tolerance Trap: How God, Genes, and Good Intentions are Sabotaging Gay Equality by Susanna Danuta Walters (New York Univ. Press, 2014) and was reminded of the now anachronistic corollary to "coming out," that of being "brought out" into the queer community by one's first same-sex partner. Walters writes:

Being "brought out" has within it that dual sense of sexuality and community. One is "brought out" by another queer person and simultaneously brought into the queer community ... coming out in these earlier and sometimes explicitly political iterations was understood as both a process personal and social, both confessional and performative, narrating a "shared fate" but also an "imagined community" (70).

This got me thinking about my own experience of coming out / being brought out into self-awareness and visible queer sexuality. My attitudes toward coming out as a helpful narrative (for myself; for others) have fluctuated a lot over the years. On the one hand, I definitely experienced the silencing pressure of presumptive heterosexuality, experienced the feeling of being closeted. People assumed I was straight and I mostly didn't correct them.

For twenty-eight years.

On the other hand, I remember having casual conversations with my mother, or reflecting in my diary, as early as age eleven or twelve, that I might possibly could maybe be a Lesbian.

I didn't know Bisexuality was an option, really, back then.

That was part of the problem.

I mean, I knew technically that there was this category of sexual identity "Bisexuality" and that it meant people who were sexually attracted to both men and women, but no one I encountered treated it very seriously. It was an elusive, moving target. Something frivolous, a subject of scorn. Men were liars if they claimed bisexuality and women (mostly college girls) were probably just using it as attention-seeking behavior.

We all know the stereotypes. I internalized many of them. I kept my mouth shut when lesbian women -- women I desperately wanted to like and mentor me -- dismissed bisexuality as tantamount to betraying the sisterhood. I judged my own desires along the gay/straight binary and determined that I didn't have enough Gay Thoughts to be properly Gay. And therefore was, by default, Straight.

So: closeted. Definitely.

Except that I had a floating question mark above myself internally as to my sexual desires, and was open about that speculation, so can I say I was ever in the closet, properly speaking?

I remained Straight for twenty-eight ... well, scratch that, more like twenty-six years. Because meeting Hanna in September 2007 began the long slow process of bringing me out.

It took eighteen months.

Though I started telling people I "wasn't entirely straight" almost immediately. Well, within the first six months. I emailed my mother -- reminding her of those conversations we'd had back in when I was twelve -- and wrote letters to friends, angsting about my crush. I started with the gay buddy whose hand I'd held through the winding path he'd taken out of the Mormon faith and into the imagined (and actual) community of queers.

Now I was joining him there, and I know for a fact he wasn't all that surprised.

Most people weren't. At least not to my face.

I was kind of insulted, actually, at the time. Especially by a few second-hand reports I received from my mother back home of family acquaintances who'd claimed they'd practically known before I did what my sexual preferences were. Who did they think they were?!

But I think their larger point was true: straight or otherwise I'd been choosing the queer path for years. I just hadn't found the right person to share it with until that moment.

Which is part of Walters point -- that for some of us same-sex desires are just one part of what it means to be queer. That for us, "coming out" isn't just about leaving the closet -- but also about being "brought out" into a larger community of people who are non-straight, non-normative in their sexuality and gender, their family formation or way of life.

I was a feminist before I was queer, and queerness suited my feminism just fine.

We've always held hands in public.

Yet I made it a promise to Hanna, even before she knew I'd made it (because she didn't know I wanted her), that I would never ask her to cover, never ask her to elide -- no matter how passively -- the nature of our relationship.

I kiss her goodbye outside work every morning, and hello again when I pick her up every evening.

I like to grab her ass while we're standing in the grocery aisle, or waiting for the subway.

These are acts both quotidian and queer. Quotidian in the sense that, as I tried to tell my mother back in the 90s, girls have definitely been possible for me for a long, long time. Quotidian in that this life of ours fits like a well-worn pair of Birkenstocks (yup, I own two pairs). That falling into bed with a woman with Hanna and building a life with her felt like my kind of normal. Like the kind of life I'd been angling for since I'd first read Anne of Green Gables or maybe ElfQuest (probably both).

Oh; this is what I wanted. It came as both a surprise and a homecoming, tangled up together like our limbs as we fell asleep at night.

On some level I must have always known.

Of course, always knowing isn't always synonymous with being known.

On some level, in the first flush of besotted love, I wanted the politics of the personal to be beside the point, but of course politics are never beside the point. Politics are intimately entangled with the possibilities of our lives, the pleasures, the dangers, what can (or must) remain private and what must (or can) become public. In recent weeks we've marked the first anniversary of the downfall of DOMA and then -- whiplash style -- heard two Supreme Court cases that etched bold messages across our legal landscape as to the rights and respect as human subjects we people with uteri have in this country.

As my rights as a lesbian bisexual expand, however modestly, my rights as a woman contract, inexorably.

My embodied self, and the choices I have made with it, are never been far from being the center of others' self-righteous debate.

So even though I framed myself as always the truth of the matter was that in needing to articulate the "always" I made clear that I had, in fact, been raised in a world that was still, itself, the closet. Entangled in a conservative political climate that framed the issues as "gay vs. straight," silenced by explicit biphobia and implicit bi erasure. I needed the safety of both a community (which I found first, online, through women in the constellations that make up the feminist blogosphere) and a person, Hanna, to "bring me out" into self-knowledge and public visibility.

I needed them to find a home.

Which is why I've circled around to respect the paradigm of coming / bringing out into the open that which has been hidden (from ourselves, from others) and celebrating its existence (our existence) in the world as something tangible and joyful -- something achieved rather than something we've always had.

Because we might always have "known" but we haven't always known.

And its only those around us who make it possible for us to share. Only those around us who make a vibrant, joyful community of sexually-various, gender-flexible people with whom it's possible to imagine a life better than the one you're currently living. Those around us who make it possible to choose queerness with pleasure.

So I say it more often these days: I'm gay. I'm bi. I'm a lesbian. I'm a dyke. I'm queer.

Because people, implicitly, explicitly, told me I couldn't be. Shouldn't be. Wouldn't be.

I tell them, now, with every act of visible queerness: I am, I should, and I will.

I choose my wife over all of them, every day.

quick hit: a must-read piece on ex-homeschool activists

The American Prospect has a most excellent article up today, The Homeschool Apostates, by Kathryn Joyce, exploring the growing visibility of young adults who are organizing and pushing back against their parents' decision to use home education as a tool for familial control:

Even conservative Patrick Henry felt like a bright new reality. While much about the college confirmed the worldview Lauren grew up in, small freedoms like going out for an unplanned coffee came as a revelation. She describes it as “a sudden sense of being able to say yes to things, when your entire life is no.”

Family ties began to fray after she met John, a fellow student who’d had a more positive homeschooling experience growing up; he took her swing dancing and taught her how to order at Starbucks, and they fell in love. Her parents tried to break the couple up—at one point even asking the college to expel Lauren or take away her scholarship for disobeying them. Their efforts backfired; soon after her graduation, Lauren married John and entered law school.

As someone who grew up within the early unschooling wave of the modern home education movement, and thrived within it, I often find myself frustrated by most media coverage of homeschooling -- it is too often simplistic, judgmental, one part awe (such well-behaved children!) one part hysteria (equating home education, per se, with child abuse). In contrast, Joyce does an excellent job of covering a specific type of homeschooling, as well as teasing out the highly gendered nature of Christian homeschooling culture. She also foregrounds the thoughtful, passionate voices of home-educated young people who look back on their childhoods and the Christian subculture they were immersed in with a critical eye.

While I don't agree with everything these ex-homeschoolers have to say, I think their voices are crucial ones for us to listen to -- particularly those of us who have benefited from the low level of state oversight that enabled our families to do our own thing while these controlling parents to did theirs. I don't always agree with the remedies these ex-homeschoolers propose, but I do believe their experiences must be taken seriously. We can't in good faith build a culture of learner-led education on the backs of young people who have been denied a very basic level of self-determination and autonomy.

Anyway. Go read the whole thing.

being friends with...humans

I realize writing commentary about a New York Times ladypiece is picking low-hanging fruit, but I have a sinus headache and it's too early to go to bed, so here we are.

If you missed it, Time magazine ran a story last week about people women who choose not to parent and the apparently glamorous, self-centered, satisfying lives we lead. As Tracie Egan Morrissey wryly pointed out at Jezebel, the write-up was framed in such a way as to ensure that even non-parenting women are wrapped into the narrative of the "batshit mommy war":

Perhaps you thought that not having children left you untethered. Wrong! Time has roped you into it, with some inflammatory quotes that will get all the mothers in the world to hiss at you brazen hussies and your childfree existences.

Most of us non-parenting ladies knew already we didn't get to opt out of that one, but thank you Time magazine for pointing it out once again so hysterically.

Meanwhile, KJ Dell'Antonia riffed off this piece at the NYT Motherload blog (tagline: "adventures in parenting," as if we needed reminding that care for children is understood to be women's work) by asking the question "can parents stay friends with the childfree?" She excerpts liberally from the Time piece, starting with:

Any national discussion about the struggle to reconcile womanhood with modernity tends to begin and end with one subject: parenting. Even Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In,” a book focused on encouraging women’s professional development, devotes a large chunk of its take-home advice to balancing work and family, presuming that, like its author, ambitious women will have both.

Dell'Antonia herself then reflects:

As a parent myself, I don’t read my tendency to gravitate toward fellow mothers as judgment — I read it as practical. Fellow parents are more likely to understand if I bail on dinner because of a sudden teacher conference, and their eyes are less likely to glaze over if my preoccupation at that dinner is more temper tantrums than, say, the right way to temper chocolate (which might once have held my interest for hours). In fact, I’d argue that it’s win-win.

So I have some thoughts. Obviously, or I wouldn't be writing this post.

Y'all know, if you've spent any time on this blog, that I come at this issue from the perspective of someone deeply invested in remaking the world into a place where families and family care-work is genuinely respected and incorporated into daily life, where children and their carers aren't ghettoized or put on a (false) pedestal while actually being treated like shit. This (probably radical, feminist, maybe a bit queer) political agenda informs how I think about most public discussions about parenting, not-parenting, work and family life, and how the current organization of our economy and social life constrains the choices we have in these areas.

I also come at this conversation from the perspective of someone who is currently, and will likely remain, partnered but non-parenting. I've written elsewhere about the factors going into that decision, which like any major decision is born of inner desires, practical realities, and the needs and desires of those the decision-maker is in close relationship with.

Here are my thoughts.

First, Dell'Antonia directs her question only to mothers:

Do we, as women who are also mothers, judge women who are not? And if we do, do we do it overtly or subconsciously — or just by excluding and including people in our lives based on proximity and similarity without realizing that the path of least resistance is one that, for a parent like me, includes mainly friends who are piloting similar family boats?

What strikes me about this framing of the question is the notion that parents and non-parents are two different species, two different tribes, without "proximity and similarity," that only fellow parents are "piloting similar family boats." I notice this a lot in writing about work-life and work-family issues, in discussions about women's decision-making around work, relationships, reproduction.

I reject this false dichotomy between parents and not-parents. Yes, obviously, parenting changes you -- just like any major life experience changes you. But I reject the notion that there's something about parenting that makes it impossible to communicate with individuals who have not yet (or never plan to) cross that divide. I see a similar dichotomy set up between single and married women (and yes, it's most often women). It has a kernel of truth, but gets set up as a means to divide people and pit them against one another. To constantly re-inscribe the supposed differences between not-parents and parents suggests that we must be in competition, that our needs and desires must be set against one another, in opposition. When in reality, our needs as humans are more similar than they are different.

Which brings me to my next point: not-parents have families too. Notice how, in the Time piece, "parenting" in the first sentence turns into "family" in the second -- with the suggestion that somehow only parents struggle with the competing responsibilities of work and home life? Hanna and I, and our cats, are a family unit. We belong to a wider family circle of parents and parents-in-law, sisters and brothers and siblings-in-law, grandparents, cousins, nieces and nephews, and extended relationship.

We also, like parents, have this thing called "home" and a life therein, where shit happens. Shit like laundry and cooking (or not-cooking because you haven't had the energy to go grocery shopping). Shit like getting sick, or caring for a sick spouse, or negotiating with the vet to find an appointment time that you can make before or after work, or on the weekends. Parenting people are not the only ones who've had to cancel a dinner date at the last minute -- or would understand the necessity of doing so, to take Ms. Dell'Antonia's example from above. If parents truly are cutting off their not-parent friends because they pre-emptively imagine there's no longer anything to talk about well ... that seems a damned shame to me. I really like my parenting friends, and I gotta say we find plenty to talk about and enjoy together.

Which brings me to my final point, which is when the fuck did friendship become a matter of sameness? Again, I get that it helps to have common interests and experiences, common values and goals. But I also feel like there's something -- a big something -- to be said for curiosity, empathetic listening, and learning. I'd never heard of Doctor Who before I met Hanna, and tonight while I'm writing this blog post we're re-watching "Rose" and talking about how awesome it is as a series re-boot. We didn't meet as fellow fans, but I was open to discovering something new.

The same could be said about parenting and not-parenting people learning how to talk about their lives (and ask questions about their friends' lives) in ways that don't automatically assume that there will be no common ground, or that just because you haven't had experience Zed you can't be interested or contribute to a discussion on the topic.

It's a pretty fucked-up version of identity politics to assume the only meaningful relationships you can have are with those who've had your specific set of life experiences.

reality check [mcdonald's style]

(via Lawyers, Guns, and Money)

It's hot here, as it is pretty much everywhere in the States right now, and I had an iced latte this afternoon to see me through my evening shift ... so sleep isn't coming. Solution: blogging.

I Tumblr-ed & Tweeted the link to this story earlier in the evening, but laying awake in the dark I was doing the math so here's an expanded/comparison version.

The sample monthly budget above is courtesy of McDonald's corporation, composed by mad ferrets working for snails in their corporate offices as a teaching aide for their minimum-wage earning employees. See employees! Living in poverty is easy! All ya gotta do is plan.

As the author of the post linked above, Robyn Pennacchia, points out this budget exists in a fantasy where things like food, gas, and heat don't cost anything -- or perhaps, can be squeezed out of that $27/day "spending money goal" at the bottom of the table? She writes:

You may think that most of these minimum wage earners are teenagers. Well, 87.9% of minimum wage earners are over the age of 20. 28% of those people are parents trying to raise a kid on this budget. That is not a good thing for our future and it is not a good thing for our economy. In order for the economy to thrive, people have to be able to buy things. All the money going to people at the top does not help us. 

I don’t want to live in any kind of dog-eat-dog Ayn Rand erotic fantasy. Human beings are worth more than that. Anyone who works 40 hours a week (nevermind 74 hours) ought be able to take care of all the basic necessities in life. Corporations shouldn’t be able to pay their workers nothing, keep all of the profits to themselves, and expect taxpayers to make up the difference with social programs. It’s not fair to the workers, and it’s not fair to any of us.

Pennacchia has the (shockingly not-shocking) national stats; I thought I'd throw a little cold-water reality on the ferrets' fantasy budget by comparing it to what Hanna and I actually have to spend on the necessities listed above. Line by line. (I said I'd had too much coffee!)

• Savings ...... $500.00

The number above is wholly comprised of 401(k) with-holdings and the money we set aside to pay Hanna's self-employment tax in April. Some of that we get to keep, thanks to deductions, but it's not exactly secure savings. We'd put some by in our slush fund earlier this year, but that went to the cats' vet bills in June.

I'm not saying all this in a poor-us fashion, I'm pointing out: $100.00/month in "savings" for someone making minimum wage probably isn't going into a retirement plan. It's likely in the sock drawer until they need to drive across the state to the only Planned Parenthood offering affordable healthcare services.

• Mortgage/Rent ...... $1295.00

We pay for a 1-bedroom in a cheapish part of Boston. I get that Boston is one of the most expensive real estate markets in the United States, but when I first moved here I was working a retail job at Barnes & Noble that paid $9.00/hour. That's only $0.75 more than the minimum wage. The idea of anyone making that level of income being able to afford a rent, let alone buy a house, is pretty laughable from where I and my compatriots are sitting. If you're putting aside $100.00/month you're not accruing anywhere near enough for a downpayment.

• Car Payment Transportation ...... $175.00

I got this number by adding together our monthly T pass expenditure (about $30/each), our monthly Zipcar membership ($75) and my Hubway membership ($7/month), with a bit of cushion for additional Zipcar fees when we need the car for more trip than usual (like to the vet). 

If we lived in the more affordable real estate zones around Boston (i.e. a place where someone might be able to rent a studio apartment for $600.00/month. Maybe. Then we'd be adding in commuter rail fees or car maintenance, insurance, parking, gas. We've done the math, and it pretty quickly starts to cancel out any savings otherwise realized.

• Car/Home Insurance Student Loans ...... $430.00

So we don't have to pay insurance for a car (which we don't have) or a home (which we don't own), but we do have to pay a percentage on our brains. While we have relatively affordable student loan payments through the federal Income-Based Repayment plan, that's still a not-inconsiderable chunk of our income every month. Which might otherwise go toward that retirement TDA or eventual home ownership. Just sayin'.

• Health Insurance ...... $225.00

Hanna and I are both generously insured through our workplaces, with plan that are not only paid for pre-tax (the equivalent of a 20% reduction in premiums) but subsidized by our employers. Harvard University even reimburses us Hanna's copayments after she reaches $135/year (no small perk when you're talking about regular physical therapy or mental health treatments at $15/visit). 

I was on my parents COBRA insurance for a couple of years out of college, and independent Blue Cross/Blue Shield catastrophic-emergency-only insurance a couple of years after that, before moving to Massachusetts and being poor enough to qualify for their state-subsidized insurance plans (thank you Ted Kennedy!). I know how even $225.00/month for a family of two is a deal.

• Heating Gas ...... $30.00

Our heat is electric (see below), and our water comes included with the rent -- but we have a gas stove and pay monthly for that, to the tune of $20-30/month. More in the winter when we're baking, less in the summer when we're too sleep deprived to cook in our non-air-conditioned apartment (which of course means we spend more on prepared meals...).

• Cable/Phone/Internet ...... $70.00

We get the have-a-television cable package for about $18/month, internet for $32, and a land-line for $28. I also maintain my old AT&T cell phone on a pay-as-you-go plan that costs us about $100/year in top-up fees.

I don't think we need to go over, once again, why services like the internet and phones are basic necessities for even those who are homeless and poverty-stricken; without connectivity it is impossible to conduct business in the world, be taken seriously by potential employers, or -- hell -- just enjoy your downtime with crap movies. 

• Electric ...... $62.00

We actually do pretty well with our electricity, no that we pay a flat monthly fee that averages out the winter highs (over $200.00) and the summer lows that come from inefficient electric heat. We pay slightly more for wind power, though the differential is pennies at our level. I wish we had the option for solar, since our apartment building gets direct afternoon sun that could really dial the meter back if taken advantage of.

• Other .... ???

"Other"? By which you mean ... food ($800.00)? Or work-appropriate clothing (~$600.00 annually)? Professional development ($500 so far this year)? Union dues ($380 annually; and no complaints from this quarter)? 

The compost collective we pay into for $20/month?

Oh, I suppose you could mean Netflix at $7.99/month...

...and yeah, you probably look askance, McDonald's, at the $4.00 latte I bought this afternoon which is fueling this late-night verbiage.

• Monthly Expenses Total ...... $2,562.00

Or 2.03 times what that McDonald's employee working 74 freakin' hours per week is supposed to be living on. 

You'll notice I haven't included anything as luxurious in here as weekend trip to Maine to visit the in-laws (about $300.00 for a car rental plus gas) or fun activities like a movie or the purchase of a used book.

On the one hand, I'm grateful that both of us have found work with employers who value and foster our skills, who encourage our professional growth, who offer generous benefits, and who compensate us within the range of professional respectability. Our household income of about $3,625/month net last year* is a solid cushion above the minimum $2,525/month supposedly required by a household of two adults to get by in our county.

On the other hand, I'm appalled that -- as a nation -- we continue to ignore the reality that is the increased cost of living well or even just securely. And that we continue to individualize a social problem -- pretending that just teaching people struggling to get by on what is patently not enough to craft and stick to a budget is somehow going to solve the problem of poverty.

The only thing that will solve poverty is better-paying employment and a strong social safety net.

And now I'm going to return to staring at the ceiling and listening to the cat hunt mosquitoes in the dark.

*I took our Adjusted Gross Income from our joint state tax form, reduced it by 20% to account for tax with-holdings, and divided by twelve. Our AGI was $54,369.00 in 2012.

bodies, state power, personhood [thoughts]

Hanna and I woke up this morning to the news that George Zimmerman has been found "not guilty" of the murder of Trayvon Martin in Florida.

I haven't followed the trial closely -- only what we heard on NPR, and the coverage by bloggers I follow regularly -- so this is not a post about what happened and why. Others much more eloquent will do a better job articulating that (see the bottom of this post for updates as I read and link to them).

What I want to say is this:

On June 26th, the Supreme Court of the United States issued a ruling about same-sex marriage that affirmed my dignity as a woman who has married another woman. I didn't need the approval of the Supreme Court to recognize that my marriage is valid. At the same time, there was something profound and powerful about an official state body affirming that my citizenship rights should not be abridged.

The day before, the same institution decided the Voting Rights Act was no longer relevant -- because apparently the poor, powerless, and marginalized don't need additional protections from the powerful and power-hungry to ensure their basic rights and well-being.

And the power-hungry immediately rose to the challenge and began abridging the right to vote.

In the weeks that have followed, we've watched the Texas legislature ram through legal restrictions on women's access to basic health and reproductive services. Women in that fine state (Molly Ivins would be proud), including elected officials, worked hard to stop the further curtailment of women's agency and meaningful ability to determine their own reproductive lives.

The legislation was passed.

Simultaneously, Mr. Zimmerman was on trial for the murder of a young black teenager, Trayvon Martin, whose sole crime was walking while black. I don't know on what grounds the jury acquitted Zimmerman -- although I'm sure I'll find out in the days to come. I wasn't gunning for Zimmerman's blood -- I don't think further violence, state-sanctioned or not, is ever the answer. But when I heard on the radio this morning that the jury had found Zimmerman Not Guilty of murder or manslaughter, my first thought was this: that the verdict represents the opposite of Windsor. It's the erasure of the personhood of Trayvon Martin by the powers that be and by our collective racism.

For if Zimmerman is Not Guilty of having killed Trayvon Martin, who is?

Are we saying murder didn't take place?

Are we saying it was a justified killing?

Are we saying, regardless, that we simply don't care?

I won't speak for anyone who knew Trayvon Martin personally, but for myself I can imagine that more than any punishment George Zimmerman may have faced upon a guilty verdict, hearing the jury speak his guilt for Trayvon's murder in so many words -- affirming Trayvon Martin's right not to be dead and the violation of that right which took place when George Zimmerman shot him -- would have been a powerful step towards truth and reconciliation. It would have been a group of fellow citizens, speaking with the authority of the state, standing up and saying this is wrong.

That didn't happen.

All of these events are profound and immediate reminders of the effect that state power can have, for good or ill, in supporting, affirming, protecting ... or erasing, negating, denying, the personhood of some people (queers, people with uteruses, non-whites, youth, the poor) in the interest of preserving the rights of the powerful not to ever feel afraid or threatened by those whom they don't understand or dislike.

If the Windsor and Perry decisions reminded me of the positive power of state and majority power, Texas and Florida have done their damnedest these past two weeks to remind me of its dangerous perils.

UPDATES [LINKS]:

Brittney Cooper @ Salon | White supremacy, meet Black rage (2013-07-14).

Though much of the mainstream media who have covered this case have convinced themselves that race did not play a role in this trial, a Black kid is dead because being young, Black, and male, and wearing a hoodie in the rain is apparently a crime punishable by death.

James Baldwin @ The Progressive | A Letter to My Nephew (1962-12). via @jsmooth995

This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish. Let me spell out precisely what I mean by that for the heart of the matter is here and the crux of my dispute with my country. You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits to your ambition were thus expected to be settled. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity and in as many ways as possible that you were a worthless human being. 

Ta-Nehisi Coates @ The Atlantic | Trayvon Martin and the Irony of American Justice (2013-07-15).

In trying to assess the the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, two seemingly conflicted truths emerge for me. The first is that based on the case presented by the state, and based on Florida law, George Zimmerman should not have been convicted of second degree murder or manslaughter. The second is that the killing of Trayvon Martin is a profound injustice. 

*note: I apologize for originally mis-spelling Trayvon's name with an "e". Not enough coffee. Corrected.

while reading windsor [friday night thoughts]

Things have all been a bit hectic since Wednesday morning, and what with one thing and another I'm just getting around to reading the full text of United States v. Windsor this evening. Scalia's dissent is as wonderful as everyone's been saying it is, and I feel the visual representation of his feels might look something like Paul Rudd's hissy fit in Wet Hot American Summer (with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg standing by in the role of Janeane Garofalo, of course):

But all joking aside, there is another aspect to this landmark decision, apart from the opportunities for comedy and even just the straightforward legal-political victory which is the end of DOMA and the practical inequalities it enacted. And that is the fact that, as a bisexual woman married to my wife in the state of Massachusetts, there is something incredibly personal and incredibly powerful about reading a majority opinion written by the Supreme Court of the United States not only affirming my equal rights as a married citizen, but affirming our rights as sexual citizens not to be devalued because of our same-sex relationships. 

It's not like my marriage was somehow lesser, or invalid, while DOMA was still the law of the land. I don't need the government to approve of my behaviors or relationship choices in order for me to feel like they were (are) the right ones for me. 

But sociopolitical marginalization, cultural erasure, and silencing happen when our voices are not heard, or listened to, in the halls of power. The majority opinion in Windsor is one small instance of feeling myself fairly and fully represented -- honored, even -- in a document issued by the highest court in the land. So often, national debate on issues that have direct bearing in my lived experience -- women's health, sexism, student loans, labor rights, environmental sustainability -- feel like they are discussed in some bizarre vacuum by people whose lives are vastly different from my own, and who have made no honest effort to understand (much less honor) what my life is like and what would make it better. 

Then, every once in a while, someone (in this case a group of someones) with a great deal of power and authority hauls it up from their toes and produces something like this:

DOMA’s principal effect is to identify a subset of state-sanctioned marriages and make them unequal. The principal purpose is to impose inequality, not for other reasons like governmental efficiency. Responsibilities, as well as rights, enhance the dignity and integrity of the person. And DOMA contrives to deprive some couples married under the laws of their State, but not other couples, of both rights and responsibilities. By creating two contradictory marriage regimes within the same State, DOMA forces same-sex couples to live as married for the purpose of state law but unmarried for the purpose of federal law, thus diminishing the stability and predictability of basic personal relations the State has found it proper to acknowledge and protect. By this dynamic DOMA undermines both the public and private significance of state-sanctioned same-sex marriages; for it tells those couples, and all the world, that their otherwise valid marriages are unworthy of federal recognition. This places same-sex couples in an unstable position of being in a second-tier marriage. The differentiation demeans the couple, whose moral and sexual choices the Constitution protects, see Lawrence, 539 U. S. 558, and whose relationship the State has sought to dignify. And it humiliates tens of thousands of children now being raised by same-sex couples. The law in question makes it even more difficult for the children to understand the integrity and closeness of their own family and its concord with other families in their community and in their daily lives. (Windsor, 22-23; emphasis mine).

For a reminder of just how awesome -- in the classical sense of the world -- the use of such language is in relation to our rights as non-straight sexual citizens, go and read E.J. Graff's personal-historical look back over the last half-century of political movement on other-than-heterosexual rights.

The court is far from perfect -- as evidenced by its Voting Rights ruling on Tuesday -- and the affirmation of queer folk as fully part of the national community is far from complete. But I am all for recognizing the gains as well as the losses, and this is -- for all that we've become nearly blase about same-sex marriage these past months, cock-sure that DOMA was going to fall -- this still is a pretty amazing, even breath-taking gain on the side of humanity.

booknotes: does jesus really love me?

cross-posted from the family scholars blog.

On Friday, while stuck at home due to the "shelter in place" orders here in Boston, I read Jeff Chu's recent book Does Jesus Really Love Me?: A Gay Christian's Pilgrimage in Search of God in America (Harper, 2013).

Part memoir, part ethnography, part journalistic endeavor, Does Jesus...? is more impressionistic than it is polemical or scholarly. Chu offers a series of portraits, featuring both people (pastors, congregants, ex-Christians, agnostics) and institutions (from the Metropolitan Community Church, overwhelmingly queer in membership, to the Westboro Baptist Church). Across sections titled "Doubting," "Struggling," "Reconciling," and "Hoping," Chu offers us a tour around America and the religious and sexual-identity spectrum  as well, introducing us to individuals and congregations wrestling with the relationship between faith and queer sexuality. Chu himself has settled into a life of being gay and Christian, he nevertheless draws empathic (if at times slightly baffled) portraits of LGBT individuals who have forged other paths: queer folks who have been driven from the church or simply drifted away, a gay man who has chosen to remain celibate, a straight woman and gay man in a "mixed orientation" marriage. While he features a few high-profile individuals (Ted Haggard, Fred Phelps, Mary Glasspool), more of the voices in Does Jesus...? are unknowns: the Bible teacher fired from his job for a same-sex affair, the closeted young adult wrestling with if, when, and how to come out to his parents and community, the Christian musician who describes with charming self-deprecation her first gig at a lesbian bar.

I found myself thinking, as I read, a very librarian question: to whom might I recommend this book? One of the pastors Chu interviews offers the following observation: she sees anti-gay Christians and affirming/welcoming Christians trying to have two very different conversations in their discussions around homosexuality. The anti-gay contingent, she maintains, is focused on scriptural authority. The affirming group is focused on stories -- on personal testimony. If this is true (though I'm not ready to buy the theory wholesale), then Chu's book will not have much success in convincing those who believe Christianity demands abstaining from same-sex sexual activity. It is not a work of exegesis, of Biblical interpretation. It is not making a theological argument. Rather, Does Jesus...? is offering us a chance to reconsider our simplistic notions of what "Christian" and "gay," and the assumption that there is but one type of relationship between the two: a repressive or alienated one.

This is an approach that I think might resonate more strongly with the "personal testimony" contingent. With LGBT folks who are, themselves, wondering, "Does Jesus really love me?" Or with queer activists asking how to engage American believers in the LGBT push for equality and acceptance. Or with unchurched/secular-identified queer folks and allies who see the church as bolstering anti-gay sentiment and are baffled why queer Christians seek to remain in the fold.

For example, as a queer woman who grew up in a conservative Christian community (in a region settled by the Reformed Church in America, Chu's present denomination!) and attended a college with deep RCA roots, one of the chapters which spoke most directly to my own experience was the chapter about Harding University.  Or, more specifically, Harding University's student-published Queer Press zine, created and distributed by queer students and alumni primarily to reach out to other (largely closeted) students on the conservative Christian campus. Not only did the creators face a backlash from the administration, they also discovered that their sectarian struggle didn't always translate very well before a secular audience:

[Secular] bloggers would praise the zine but add, "Why would you go to a school that doesn't accept you for who you are?" or "Why not just leave?" These questions reflect a different type of thoughtlessness. For one thing, Harding students are just like millions of others who depend financially on Mom and Dad [to attend college]. Then there's the fact that, again like millions of others everywhere, these students are in a season of fragility and flux. They're still wrestling with their identities, their faith, and their homosexuality, which may not even be acknowledge before college. As one puts it to me, "It's not like someone woke up one morning and said, I'm gay but I'm to go there and make my life suck."

When queer students and allies at my alma mater were making a concerted effort to get the Board of Trustees to revisit their official anti-gay stance, some high-profile queer-friendly blogs got wind of the struggle and there was a lot of puzzlement over why these students had enrolled in, or remained at, such a hostile institution. Setting aside the reality that secular institutions are not always bastions of acceptance themselves, it seems important for non-Christian LGBT activists and allies to remember that "Christian" is often as deeply-held an identity as "lesbian," "bi," or "gay." To ask a queer person raised Christian why they don't just quit their faith is profoundly lacking in compassion or understanding for the complexity of the human soul.*

Overall, I highly recommend Does Jesus..? to anyone interested in reflecting on the human face of the culture war (for lack of a better term) over sexual diversity in American Christianity. It might also, given its episodic nature, make for really good Sunday School or Church reading group material.

Related: For those unable to put their hands on a copy of the book, Chu was a guest on the Diane Rehm Show back in March, and it was an excellent conversation. You can listen to the audio or read a full transcript of the interview (your support for NPR at work!) courtesy of WAMU.

---

*On a side note, I know many feminists who've encountered similar disbelief that they choose to reconcile their religiosity and their feminism -- often, in fact, grounding their feminist values in their faith. It's fascinating to me that so many people on both sides (the religious side or the queer/feminist side) view these aspects of self as oil-and-water opposites.

a few more thoughts + cats and flowers

kumquats and plants in the kitchen window

Hanna and I are both finding today much more difficult, emotionally, than yesterday. Yesterday was a day of waiting: between 6am and about 7pm we were asked to stay indoors and essentially nothing happened apart from rampant media speculation.

Then at around eight in the evening, law enforcement officials caught the young man they were looking for hiding in a boat in Watertown.

He was taken to the hospital, injured, and will not be read his Miranda rights before being questioned.

this day needed flowers, so I went out and took pictures

Let me say, first, that I am grateful no more blood was spilled; no more life lost. I am glad that whatever threat this young man and his brother, killed in the chase, represented to the world is no more. I support preventing harm. I also support holding people responsible for their actions, though not through execution, so if Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is, in fact, responsible for the marathon bombings I hope he is tried and a just verdict rendered. I also understand why many, many people are angry and afraid -- and why their first reaction is the desire for vengeance.

It's just that I rarely think we should act on our first reactions, or even our second. Perhaps our third or forth thoughts ought to be listened to, but sometimes we must practice patience longer than that. And Hanna and I find ourselves dispirited by the amount of anger and vitriol being spewed across the Internet toward this wounded teenager who -- presuming they have the right man -- did monstrous things, but is also currently alone, in pain, and no doubt terrified.

magnolias outside our apartment building

We've had people tell us we are monstrous ourselves for trying to practice empathy for both victims and perpetrators simultaneously; for suggesting that just because someone has done evil deeds does not mean they deserve questionably legal treatment or abuse. Suffering is sometimes necessary, but never justified, never right. And I question the wisdom of wishing it hatefully upon another human being, even if he himself has allegedly inflicted vast amounts of suffering upon others.

We do not wish to become a mirror to the very violence we profess to abhor.

teazle in the sun

I realize I am a minority voice, at this moment, and that my desire to practice nonviolence is no doubt seen by many as foolish, a position born of privilege.

Perhaps this is so. I am a Bostonian: I work half a mile from Copley Square, the marathon finish line, and live in a neighborhood just across the river from Watertown. I am not speaking from a place of geographical abstraction from the events of yesterday. Yet I was lucky enough that everyone I knew running the marathon escaped unscathed; I did not spend yesterday with tanks or SWAT teams in my street.

But I believe it is part of what I can offer, in these troubling days: mindfulness, and attention to the fact that all of us are flawed and broken. That law enforcement can make mistakes and act violently, that the civil rights of murderers should not be treated lightly, and that even those who inflict suffering can suffer in turn.

I have been trying hard (and believe me -- it is a discipline) to hold all those suffering, and all those struggling to make ethical decisions right now, in my thoughts and in my heart.

May we all move forward toward less hate and suffering.

And obviously, more kittens.

 And books.

some thoughts

flowering trees on the Charles River esplanade (May 2012)

Shortly before midnight last night Hanna and I started getting automated calls from Harvard University (Hanna works in their medical library) alerting staff to security concerns around MIT and in Cambridge and Allston-Brighton. Between midnight and six this morning we had maybe ten to a dozen such calls, making for a fitful night of interrupted sleep -- as helicopters droned overhead and sirens wailed in the night air.

A phone call just before six announced the University closed for the day; when WBUR clicked on at six o'clock, we heard our neighborhood of Allston-Brighton was one of the communities in lock-down, with residents asked not to leave their homes, and all public transit was suspended until further notice.

As most of you have probably heard by now, during the night two young men robbed a convenience store near MIT and shot an MIT security guard who attempted to intervene. The two suspects in the robbery -- now believed to be the suspects sought in relation to the Monday bombings at the Boston marathon -- escaped in a hijacked SUV to Watertown where there was an exchange of gunfire and some explosives thrown from the vehicle. One of the young men was shot by law enforcement officers and died in hospital. The other is still at large -- hence the city-wide shutdown as police attempt to track him down.

Hanna and I will be at home today. We are safe, with our cats, and the weather is beautiful. There is a coffee cake baking in the oven as I write this post.

The media, including NPR, are all going wild with speculations and scraps of information, so I'd like to take this opportunity to ask everyone to exercise patience as we wait. Patience, and hopeful intention that violence will not begat more violence.

Initially, people -- at least three of them -- died in the bomb blasts on Monday; the first act of violence. Over one hundred were injured, and currently struggling to heal.

One of those hundred-plus injured was a young man from Saudi Arabia whose ethnicity and presence at the scene of the blasts ("running while Saudi") led to further acts of violence: instead of being offered help and care for his injuries he was tackled to the ground, his apartment searched aggressively by investigators. It took them hours to clarify that he was not a suspect while the media coverage ran with the story of Islamic terrorists -- our favorite scapegoat du jour.

Then we had a high school track star, also darker skinned, who was the media's latest potential threat. His crime was, also, existing in public while young and male and not White.

Now we have these two young men, reportedly Chechen (the original Caucasians!), whose actions -- taken in a metropolitan area on edge -- have begat more violence. Obviously, their killing of the MIT security guard was wrong, and their actions in the wake of being caught in the midst of a robbery are only furthering the damage done.

But I worry about the way in which they're being so strongly linked to the marathon bombings.

I worry about the fact that one of the men -- said to be brothers -- has already been killed, in turn, by law enforcement.

I worry about what investigators, in their drive to find the bombers, will do in haste and violently.

I worry about the violence that may come from individuals and families that feel cornered.

While it is plausible, certainly, that these two young men from the 7-11 robbery were somehow involved in Monday's bombings, let's imagine for a second that they were not. Let's imagine they were out on a Thursday night and decided to rob a store (poor plan, but hardly an act of terrorism). Because they had guns, when they got caught by a guard one of them panicked and shot -- and killed. Now, of course, they're in deep shit on a number of levels, so the panic escalates ... and things get worse from there.

Again, perhaps the investigators have the right people. And regardless, even unconnected to the bombings, the young man still alive has participated in violence that warrants his arrest and trial for murder.

But I am skeptical enough of state power and the abuse of authority -- and the mobthink that happens when a community reacts defensively against a (real or perceived) threat -- that I will spend the day worried. And probably many days to come.

Today, I am going to try and hold in my thoughts all of the people caught up in this outbreak of violence. My hope is that we can prove the terrorists of the Boston marathon wrong by not becoming the world they sought to create: one in which violence begats violence and, exponentially, the trauma rises. My hope is that we will work with determination not to respond with force that mirrors the violence of those who maimed and killed less than a week ago.

I'd like to feel proud of my country and my adoptive city in a way I wasn't, so much, in the wake of 9/11 when our response was to go bomb Afghanistan and then start a war with Iraq.

So I will try to sit with hopeful intention, and work toward building a better -- less violent -- world.

the feminist librarian's bookshelf: five women's lives

cross-posted from the family scholars blog.

March was women's history month and this post was supposed to go up the week of March 25 ... but the last couple of weeks have gotten away from me. So here is the second installment of The Feminist Librarian's Bookshelf -- the March edition in April!

The theme this time is women's history and I chose to highlight five biographies or autobiographies by and about women whose lives and work have left an impression upon my own sense of "how to live?"

If I had to draw out some common themes from across these women's lives I would say that some of the characteristics that unite this women are: leftist-radical politics, a vision for more equality and well-being (of many kinds)  in the world, and unconventional personal and family relationships.

Sylvia Pankhurst, 1909

Sylvia Pankhurst (1882-1960). Sylvia Pankhurst: A Crusading Life by Shirley Harrison (Aurum Press, 2003). An often-overlooked member of the notorious Pankhurst family, Sylvia Pankhurst was the second daughter of women's rights activists Emmeline and Richard Pankhurst. Her elder sister Cristabel would become famous on both sides of the Atlantic for her political theater. Sylvia was deeply involved in her family's feminist activism, but eventually loosened her ties with them as Britain's entry into the First World War exacerbated their differences over tactics and priorities. Sylvia pursued her own work in London's impoverished East End, publishing a journal called the Women's Dreadnaught, providing affordable meals and health services as well as supporting efforts to organize labor unions. Further radicalized by the Great War, Sylvia became an increasingly outspoken peace activist and also a critic of British imperialism. In the 1930s she became involved in anti-colonization activism, principally in support of Ethiopian independence; she would eventually make her home in Ethiopia. 

Sylvia never married, though she sustained two long-term relationships: the first with Labour Party founder Keir Hardie (though there is no conclusive evidence the two had a physical relationship), and the second with Italian anarchist Silvio Corio. Sylvia and Silvio lived together for over thirty years (until his death) and Sylvia gave birth to their son, Richard, in 1927. Reportedly, it was Sylvia's refusal to marry Silvio which caused the final rupture with her parents and elder sister Cristabel. I am fascinated by the way the story of this particular radical Pankhurst daughter is so often eclipsed by the high-profile lives of her mother and sister who were radical on the subject of suffrage but reactionary and chauvinistic in many other ways.

Dorothy Day (1897-1980). The Long Loneliness (Harper and Row, 1952). Catholic activist Dorothy Day began her career in political struggle as a journalist  in the Lower East Side of New York City where she covered labor and feminist activism for such eminent socialist newspapers as The Liberator and The Masses. During this period Day was in a serious relationship with fellow leftist Forster Batterham, though her increasing interest in Catholicism put a strain on their relationship and by the time Day gave birth to their daughter, Tamar, she and Batterham were no longer a couple. Several years after Tamar's birth, in the depths of the Great Depression, Day met French emigre and eccentric intellectual Peter Maurin; the two formed a friendship which would become the foundation from which Dorothy Day pursued her social justice work. Together, they began publishing The Catholic Worker and eventually expanded their efforts to provide meals and shelter to the destitute in a communal setting.  The Catholic Worker Movement is still extant today, maintaining uneasy ties to the Catholic church.

Throughout the Second World War, Day and her fellow Workers maintained a commitment to pacifism, and following the war Day was arrested numerous times while on nonviolent protest against the Cold War and nuclear proliferation. They also became involved in the Civil Rights movement. There is a movement within the Catholic church to have Dorothy Day canonized as a saint, although throughout her life she resisted efforts to describe her work as somehow super-human, miraculous or otherwise noteworthy. I am a troubled admirer of Dorothy Day, whose complicated relationship with the feminist activism of her day makes her a difficult ally in many ways -- even as she dedicated her life to lessening human suffering of many kinds.

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962 ). A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by Mary Ann Glendon (Random House, 2001). I have never been particularly interested in Eleanor Roosevelt as a public personage -- though the two-volume biography by Blanche Weisen Cook is a tour de force -- but a history professor at my undergraduate college once made me a gift of this slim historical study of Roosevelt's role in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It's not a biography per se, but I include it here because I think it captures a unique historical moment in the twentieth century through the lens of one woman's involvement. The UDHR was drafted by an international committee in the "pause" between World War Two and the height of the Cold War, and represents the hubris of the West (particularly the United States) in believing they could create a truly "new" internationalist, peaceful, humanitarian world -- as well as the pragmatic reality of international politics which demanded compromise of that vision in order to produce anything of use.

Even if you are a skeptic of the United Nations, of internationalism, and/or not a fan of Eleanor Roosevelt, I think there is much to learn from this particular chapter in our political past.

Margaret Mead (1901-1978). Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years  (William Morrow, 1972). I first encountered Mead's story in college while working on an independent study on the first generations of women college graduates. Mead was the daughter of two academics -- her father was a professor of economics and her mother a sociologist. Her childhood was spent in and out of formal schooling as her family moved around the country, and she spent a year at DePauw University in Indiana before transferring to Barnard College (then a young upstart of a women's college in cosmopolitan New York). She went on from Barnard to study under anthropologists Franz Boaz and Ruth Benedict, earning her PhD from Columbia University in 1929. Mead is best known for her study of adolescent girls in Samoa, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), although her anthropological curiosity ranged far and wide. While some of her frameworks for understanding feel outmoded today, she was instrumental in making the lives of women and children a legitimate field of study.

In Blackberry Winter Mead suggests a connection between her wide-ranging study of human cultures and her own exploration of relationships and family life, which took a decidedly unconventional path. Married while in graduate school (she refers in Winter to her "student marriage"), she and her first husband parted apparently amicable ways before she left for her fieldwork in Samoa. Her second marriage was equally short-lived and rocky by all accounts, ending in 1935. British anthropologist Gregory Bateson was her third husband, and the only spouse with whom she had children -- a daughter, Mary, whom she gave birth to in 1939. Mead also had long-lasting, passionate relationships with Ruth Benedict and another anthropologist, Rhoda Metraux, although the extent to which either relationship was sexually intimate is up for debate.

Gerda Lerner and her husband Carl, 1966 (via)

Gerda Lerner (1920-2013). Fireweed: A Political Autobiography (Temple University, 2002). When historian Gerda Lerner passed away on January 2 of this year, her obituaries widely proclaimed her one of the founding mothers of the field of women's and gender history. Without question, it is thanks to Lerner and her pioneering cohort of historians who insisted on gender as a valid category of analysis that I am able to do what it is that I do and be taken seriously as a scholar. Yet what I think is even more intriguing is the political and social milieu that such a scholar came out of -- and it is this "pre-history," if you will, that Fireweed sets out to tell.

Gerda Lerner (nee Kronstein) was born in Austria on the eve of the Second World War, was a student activist against the Nazi party (a form of political participation that landed her in jail when she was seventeen), and escaped to the United States as a refugee in 1939. She married the boyfriend with whom she had fled to America, but the marriage did not last by the mid-1940s she was married to Carl Lerner, a director in theater and later film, and an active Communist. Husband and wife shared a common political cause and throughout the 40s and 50s they worked side by side (with their children in tow) on behalf of labor, civil rights, peace, and against McCarthyism. Lerner did not return to school until she was in her 40s, earning her PhD from Columbia University in 1966 with a dissertation examining the work of Sara and Angelina Grimke, two white Southern women who had found it in themselves to agitate against slavery. Lerner was 46 years old.

I think what I find most compelling about Lerner's biography is its testament to the human capacity for "second acts," if you will -- that a life so filled with political struggle and the daily grind of survival could change direction at the midpoint and channel that energy into scholarship that was, perhaps, quieter than high-stakes anti-Nazi activism or labor organizing (certainly involving less jail time!) but was just as revolutionary in its own way.

This list is obviously limited by my own inclinations and concerns. I am conscious that of these five women, all are white and middle class by upbringing and education if not by fiscal measures. Although only three of the five are American by birth, the other two are Western European. None lived the majority of their lives in a same-sex relationship, although at least two women (Mead and Roosevelt) appear to have "swung both ways," holding passionate attachments to both women and men during their lives.

What biographies and autobiographies of and by women have you found meaningful in your own life? What women in history speak to you?

why do I write (and read) fan fiction? [part three]

See part one and part two for the context of this post.

So having explored fan fiction generally (and why I'm drawn to it) and erotic fan fiction as a sub-genre of fic, and why I think it's important, I thought I'd round this little series out with some thoughts on what draws me to the particular fandoms and pairings (relationships) I write ... and what I'm trying to do when I write them. Besides, you know, enjoy the smut. I'm also going to address, below, a couple of questions I've fielded lately about the ethics of fic-writing practice.

Donna Noble (Doctor Who)*

Why write the pairings I write?

Well, so, it's tempting to say that I write the things I write because I find them compelling and I just do, okay? On a certain level, trying to explain why you find the the fiction you like compelling is like trying to explain why you love your partner. It's not really reducible to a bullet point list.

But on the other hand, I'm me. So of course I have some Thoughts on the subject. And it starts with the fact that I consumed a lot of erotic fan fiction at a point where I was beginning to actively think about relational sexuality and how sexual identity and desire worked in peoples' lives (see post two). And I really enjoyed a lot of fan fic I was reading, mostly gay male pairings 'cause those were the fandoms Hanna and I were reading, but I struggled to find sexually-explicit lesbian pairings. And the femslash I did come across was frustratingly in-explicit about sex, or written by people who didn't seem to fully grasp the possibilities of what two female-bodied people might do together, sexual-intimacy wise. Hetero and gay male sex scenes in fic (and, to be fair, in a lot of regular porn) work on a fairly standard narrative arc that culminates in penetrative sex -- penis-in-vagina or anal sex -- as The Most Bestest Form of Sexual Intimacy. It's pretty much always orgasm-producing for both partners and sometimes it's clear the authors (and the characters they're writing) don't consider sex to have happened until there's been a penis inside a vagina or an anus.

Without a penis, what do you do?! Okay, yes, there are dildos and vibrators, but honestly not a lot of fics wade into the territory of sex toys very skillfully, and dildos in a lesbian sex scene too often just cue the author to assume sex with a dildo is about role playing het sex. Which it can be, but certainly doesn't have to be. In my opinion, it's much more fun to start without that penetrative-sex-as-goal model in mind and think about all the ways two bodies might come together (double entendre very much intended).

Idris - the TARDIS personified (Doctor Who)*

So I developed a (Queer, Feminist) Agenda. Which was to inject the world with realistic smut about ladybits. Smut that was tactile, visceral, about real bodies coming together and people making meaning out of the sex they were engaged in. And I'm an historian, so I started out pilfering from Downton Abbey, writing an eight-story arc about Sybil Crawley and Gwen. And I went on from there to other female pairings and eventually stuck my toe into the waters of m/m slash. It was kind of terrifying at first, pushing out into writing about men having sex -- something I don't have hands-on experience with. But I discovered that, at least the way I go about it, the characters take hold of the narrative regardless of gender and help me feel my way through giving them positive (and I hope realistic) sexual experiences! And in part, I was motivated by the same (Queer, Feminist) Agenda as I had been with writing female-bodied sex scenes: the be-all and end-all of sex for guys doesn't have to be penetration.

I'm hardly the first person to observe this, but for people who are queer in some way, writing slash fiction can be a way to revise the heteronormative narratives of mainstream media. And, I'd add as a feminist, it can be a way to revise sexism and other isms as well. Watching a television show with primarily straight relationships and re-writing or filling in those stories to imagine queer relationships injects our experience into the cultural discourse. Characters on television, in film, in books, are assumed straight until explicitly identified as queer; fan fiction more often assumes that everyone is a little bit queer unless they're proven to be straight. It's a re-visioning of the world in which sexual variety is the norm -- one part reflection of our actual experiences in queer subcultures, and one part wishful "what if..." thinking. Looking at my small repertoire of fic pairings, I'd argue I tend to choose characters who have the potential to -- when queered in some way -- disrupt the normative expectations about sex and relationships that we see in a lot of porn, erotica, and mainstream media -- television shows, movies, etc., the original material from which fan fiction is born. Perhaps starting out as a critique of the original material, I often find my acts of fanfic subversion increases my pleasure as a consumer of the original material.

I enjoy writing stories about women unabashedly enjoying sex and knowing their bodies. I enjoy writing stories about elder folk, late-in-life lesbianism, about people having sex when their bodies don't always work the way they want them to. I like writing fic in which it's taken for granted (by me, the author, at least) that men can, and do, enjoy a full range of emotional intimacy, body insecurities, carry baggage from damaging relationships, enjoy sex that isn't always fucking. (In fact, I have yet to write a fic that includes men having anal sex.) I like writing the vulnerability of desire, about what it means to expose to another person just how much you want, and (often even more frightening) what you want. I like writing sex that includes awkward conversations and misunderstandings and bodies that frustrate and fears that overwhelm -- but that all ultimately circle around that moment of knowing and being known that can come when people get naked together, in every sense of the word.

The ethics of slash: a few final thoughts.

Aside from the ethics of porn, which is a topic about which much ink (and internet bile) has been spilled, the ethics of fan fiction (or, more generally, "transformative works") is itself a topic for discussion on the internet and beyond. Hanna and I belong to the Organization of Transformative Works, a non-profit organization that advocates for the practice of fan works and also runs the Archive of Our Own project, which seeks to collect and preserve fan works online. They publish a peer-reviewed journal, Transformative Works and Cultures, that explores fandom in its infinite varieties. So if you're interest is piqued and you'd like to delve into the politics and culture of fan creation -- or poke around and read some fic or whatever variety! -- I really can't recommend them highly enough.

What I wanted to do here is touch on a couple of ethical issues that have come up recently in conversation with friends -- namely the ethics of "m/m erotica" written by women, and the practice of writing RPF or "real person" fic.

Can, or should, women write erotica about gay men?

Periodically, there are internet-based wrangles over whether or not "m/m erotica" -- which in the world of published romance/erotica generally means "gay porn for girls," or (usually) women-authored fiction about gay male relationships marketed to a (presumed straight) female readership -- is ethical (see for example here and here). The question is whether the m/m genre is exploitative, a hetero appropriation of gay male culture. The practice of writing erotic fan fiction is overwhelmingly a female one, and male/male pairings -- as I write above -- generate an incredible amount of enthusiasm, from both writers and readers (who appear to be, again, overwhelmingly female).

As an aside: fan-fiction writing as a feminized activity is something that deserves attention, and I have no doubt someone somewhere is doing incredible work on it. I think there's a lot to explore in that dynamic -- and I'm looking forward to being a part of the conversation, along with people who've done way more research than I into the phenomenon.

But back to the ethics of being a woman writing/reading porn involving men having sex with other men. Which is something I, a cis woman, do on a near-daily basis (see above). I admit that, when the articles about m/m erotica appeared, I did some soul-searching about it. When people suggest an activity might be exploitative it's pretty much always a good idea to take their position seriously and listen to what they have to say. But. Here's my thing about the case against m/m erotica: it basically comes down to an argument that if people of sexual identity A create or consume erotica about (fictional) people of sexual identity B, particularly if there's a dynamic of social privilege in the mix, that's per se a problem.

But sexual identity isn't some sort of siloed, static thing -- or at least I don't experience it that way. Our sexual identities, desires, practices -- they're messy and complicated and shift over time. Preferred sex and/or gender of one's actual partners aside, we can have fantasies and enjoy porn about practices we would never want to actually engage in. And, I would argue, we can find porn about bodies and practices we don't per se find arousing, arousing because so much of sex isn't the geometry of bodies coming together but (see post two) the narrative surrounding that context. Recent research is beginning to support this notion, particularly for female-bodied persons. As J. Jack Halberstam points out in the recent book Gaga Feminism (Beacon Press, 2012):

People are not asking why it is that gay men do not, generally speaking, produce any [sexual] fantasies around femininity, while lesbians produce lots of fantasy environments that include men or masculinity. When, in The Kids Are All Right, the lesbian couple watches gay male pornography to spice up their sex life, the scene was met with incredulity, especially from gay men. Indeed, a gay magazine journalist called me and asked me to comment on this bizarre (to him) scene. I responded that lots of lesbians watch and like gay male porn, straight male porn, and everything in between ... [According to sexual response studies] while men, gay and straight, tend to respond in inflexible ways to erotic images of men and women (straight men want to see female bodies, gay men want to see male bodies), women, gay and straight, tend to respond in flexible ways to images of men, women, and animals. (p. 87-88).

So my point is that what sounds like a fairly reasonable call for non-appropriation ("what do these straight women think they're doing, fantasizing about gay men!") becomes tangled really quickly.

To use my own example: I'm a bisexual woman in a same-sex relationship with another woman. Does that mean I'm only "allowed" to be involved in reading/writing porn featuring two women? Are threesomes okay -- or not, because I'm not in an open or poly relationship? If I write about sex involving male bodies, is it okay because as a bi woman I'm sexually attracted to men? But then it would be okay for straight women to write gay porn also, so maybe I'm only allowed to write porn about hetero pairings? But I've never been in a straight relationship, and identify as part of the queer community -- so maybe that's off-limits as well. But if I'm part of the queer community then we're back where we started: maybe I get to create and consume porn about same-sex couples because I'm part of a same-sex couple?

So you end up on this merry-go-round of factors that could be used to determine who is or isn't "qualified" or ethically able to create certain types of sexual fictions. And I think that that sort of policing ultimately impoverishes us all. If we started saying that straight people could only write or enjoy porn about straight folks, and gay men and lesbians could only write or enjoy porn about gay men and lesbians ... not only would we miss out exploring the sexual diversity of humanity through the imaginative act of writing and reading, but we'd also be ignoring that there are people who don't fit into these neat and tidy categories of the self.

I'm not saying there isn't a place for critique. Hell, in my book, there's nothing in the world so sacrosanct as to be beyond critique. And I absolutely believe that there is porn out there that fetishizes queerness for the straight gaze. I mean, I wouldn't be writing porn in the first place if I hadn't gotten frustrated with the conventions and stereotypes I saw being recapitulated over and over in the porn I was reading. So I think anyone involved in writing erotica should be open to conversation about their work, open to hearing people say, "Hey, that thing you did there in that story rubbed me the wrong way, and here's why." It's not a requirement to engage, but I would hope the resulting conversation could be an opportunity for growth for all involved.

What are my feelings on "real person" erotic fan fiction?

Yup, it's a thing in the world, people writing (often erotic) fan fiction featuring real-life celebrities. Often, though not always, these celebrities are the actors portraying the characters that these same authors write other fan fiction pieces about. But there are also people who write erotic fan fiction about politicians, musicians, and other people in the public eye.

I had a follower on Twitter ask me last week what I think about the practice:

@feministlib Must ask: do you have thoughts on RPF/RPS in contrast to general fanfic or slash fiction? Ethical/Moral/Creative boundaries?
— Jen Jurgens (@capricurgens) January 19, 2013

I responded:

@capricurgens thanks for asking! short answer is that I'm squicked out by RPF because it feels non-consensual and intrusive to me (1/2)
— feministlibrarian (@feministlib) January 19, 2013

@capricurgens if person wants to write/film erotica starring themselves & partners & others enjoy it, ok. but RPF = non-con in my book (2/2)
— feministlibrarian (@feministlib) January 19, 2013

And I'm not sure I have a whole lot more to add to this "short answer" response. Characters (whether portrayed by actors or written about in a text) are characters not human beings. We joke about how they take over our brains and insist their own version of events, but at the end of the day they are human creations -- not humans themselves. They have no independent bodily autonomy or agency. They have no legal or social standing as persons. Real people do.

Real people can create erotica or pornography that involves themselves and offer it to others (friends or strangers) to enjoy consuming -- as long as everyone's staying safe and is able to consent without coercion I'm down with that. I even think teenagers technically under the age of consent should have the protected right to create erotica materials involving themselves and share those materials with their peers as part of their own sexual exploration. Obviously this raises questions about how to give them a safe space to explore their sexuality without being exploited, and I agree that's a conversation to be had. But the general principle is: we should all have the creative license to explore our sexuality in textual and visual ways and share it as we desire.

However: consent is key here. I imagine human beings have always developed fantasies around other actual people prior to full and enthusiastic consent being given -- in the case of those we later become sexually intimate with -- or in situations where those relationships will never flower, but we're crushing hard anyway. This isn't about policing personal imagination -- have all the damn fantasies you want about whomever and whatever you find turns you on.

I'd argue, though, that in the case of fantasies about real live actual people who aren't involved in the spinning out of those fantasies? Those stories or images are best left in private spaces: your computer hard-drive, your journal, whatever. I'm not thinking so much of regulation here -- I'm not arguing we pull RPF from the Archive and ban people from publishing more -- but I'm arguing that as a matter of common courtesy it's kinda, well, rude, to put your fantasies about actual people who you have no relationship with and who aren't consenting to have these sexualized stories or images created around them out into the world of the 'net where those same people could presumably come across said stories by Googling their names.

If someone wrote an erotica story -- even a really sweet hot one! -- about me as me and posted it online and I stumbled across it, it would feel really stalkery and invasive to me. Like, my wife is the only one at this point in time who has my permission to spin out stories about my bits that way.

So yes, I do think there are boundaries and ethical considerations where fan-creation is concerned. And I appreciate that there are people within fandom who are willing and interested in engaging in ongoing conversations about those difficult aspects of the genre. What I do hope is that those outside of the genre will think twice before dismissing the practice wholesale as facile or perverted (in the not-cool way). Because I think fan engagement with (mainstream) creative works has a lot of potential to change and complicate the (mainstream) conversation about human sexuality.

---

*One of the pieces of fan fiction I'm most proud of is a Donna Noble/Idris fic completed for last year's International Day of Femslash.