Reportback from Femme-Bottomville



I mark today six weeks into being sexually active again, and two weeks into dating again, after a year and a half of heavy grieving from my girlfriend's suicide. I have to say, it's a bad time to run out of antidepressants. But, on the other hand, I'm enjoying rediscovering my femme-bottom identity after being a tentant of Celibate-Misanthropolis.



Some new discoveries about my femme-bottomhood:



Reprising my teenage experiments with makeup and nailpolish -- where the goal was to be punk and different -- are useful for knowing the color-combination DON'Ts. Punk is an aesthetic that is ready to be put on its pension. Especially if you don't like to make the first move (i.e. are trying to look approachable).



Losing my compulsion to locate someone on the socio-political activist spectrum in favor for operating from my gut reactions -- essentially subjugating my intellect to make it bottom to my sexual instinct -- was the best new thing to come out of the complete crash-meltdown that was/is my grief-process. Butch tops often have sordid personal histories leading to interesting political insights that are not positioned in relation to the rest of the progressive movement, but all the same are valid and worthy. Being less judgemental makes me a better, happier bottom.



Asking my date what I should wear, something my ultraliberated mind would never do before, is now fun. Ultimately, I don't care what I look like as long as it doesn't fall under the rubrick of "embarrassing to my date."



And lastly: do your freakin' hair BEFORE your nails. Good god you'd think I would be smart enough to have figured this out by now. But just now with the putting in the bobby pins with the wet nails. FYI, there's no better way to completely and instantly ruin a nail job.



By the way, thank you Shar Rednour for being a beacon of good sense in femme self-caretaking. I keep remembering parts of your book The Femme's Guide to the Universe. Especially the advice about not cheaping out on things that go on your skin.



Some historical discoveries I've been mulling about femme-bottomhood:



I just have to say, the days of the Lesbian Avengers were good days. But the L.Av. are dead and it's because we were the sorts to challenge labels and gender/ sexual identity, so when we looked around and the entire group here in San Francisco was identifying as FTM or MTF or bisexual or a supersized combination order of these, and nobody's first choice of identity was lesbian, we tried to change the name and the group dissolved. Honestly, I bailed before the name change. I just didn't care enough to sit through endless processing about the word "lesbian." But BEFORE we all gave up on identity politics and were happy to be assumed to be lesbians, we had a kissing booth fundraiser at the Folsom Street (leather kink) Fair where all the bisexual femme bottoms (me among them) made a rule. We would not kiss a strange bioman, anyway not as a cheap-ass $5-per-kiss fundraiser. The butch tops, on the other hand, were all gung ho (ahem) to give the boys a taste of a lipsticked shaved-headed manly-woman. They wanted all the money we could get.



So what was that about? You'd think to us femme bottomy types it wouldn't matter whether we kissed another boy. But we had all been in some way or another scarred by consensual bad boy top experiences. I don't think I was able to completely embrace my femme bottom identity with a feeling of empowerment until I extended this Folsom Street Fair Kissing Booth rule into the rest of my life: no kissing of bioboys I don't know. It's a good rule. Especially since I've extended my definition of "know" to require one calendar year of being around the person. It effectively makes me a lesbian. But I can't rule out bioboys, even under these conditions, so I still call myself bisexual. I think I used to think that these rules made me a coward, but now I know it makes me a good bottom. Good bottoms make their own rules and make their rules known, and then abandon control from that seat of power.



Why I think femme bottoms don't have a special community support network like every other damn microdemographic:



We should, but we don't have a lot of spaces to ourselves. We are essentially the most private/ invisible sector of the queer community, partly because we tend to pass as het. Also because - even though most of us are politically or socially very active - we tend to be really very independent and reluctant to go outside our inner circle of friends for support. In other words, you don't find a lot of femme bottoms in support groups. In mountain climbing clubs or circles of artists, yes, but not in a place where we advertise our weaknesses to potential caretakers. We know the power of the caretaker, and we select our caretakers (tops) with extreme care. So, it's not that we wouldn't do well to have some unity among us, but wherever we make ourselves a public demographic, we become the targets of bad tops. So, we are quiet and grateful to find eachother where we do.



And where do we find eachother? In kink-positive space. I was a fan of the famous "Fuck Fests" here at the dear, departed Castlebar in San Francisco, where we separated the room into two sides, top and bottom, and it was your choice to define yourself as you wanted to be for the duration of the party. There were tables on which we could extend ourselves (from neck-down) under a thick black curtain, on which we would pin (on the "top" side) our list of limits and desires. The tops weren't allowed to communicate directly with us, only through dungeon monitors who were standing on guard on both sides of the curtain. I found such amazing sisterhood among the (butch and femme) women/ FTMs on the "bottom" side of the curtain. We took care of eachother, we enjoyed eachother's pleasure, we gave hugs and butt-slaps where they were needed, and we fed eachother complements and food. It was the most powerful, pleasureful, sexually secure space I've ever been with a group of people, and it still strikes me what a rare feeling that is. There won't be any more Fuck Fests (the venues for such things are basically gone from the city), but I will always cherish that memory of bottom-bonding. It was like the hard workers of the non-management part of staff getting together to just see our numbers and temporarily unionize-- viva the struggle of the hard working bottoms!

Stalking a Social Life



Well, my dear readers, I have been slacking on blogging because I have been stalking a social life. I think I have it effectively cornered and I am figuring out how to feed it. Here are some morsels I have thrown at it that were tasty:



The Monterey Bay Aquarium - I went with friends to grovel before the Cthulic cuttlefish, but they did not demand a sacrifice... this time.



The Ruby Room - I've been trying to log hours under the red lights to get my hipster quotient up out of the negative numbers. Some mighty dykey bartenders, who (bonus!) are also usually my neighbors in East Oakland.



Exodus - I was honored to organize a reading/ performance thingy with this incredibly talented, young and powerful lady hiphopster, the author of these words (the poem "My dinner plate/ grandma's back yard"):

Simple greens

Verses frozen beans

Corn meal

Knee- d- ed into corn bread

Light Mango spread

On Banana bread

Eat your spinach like your mother said

And charge your chard

Paint the rainbow with your squash

And cry like the Nile with

Saboas

Lentil jump around in my

Arroz con pollo

Tauro, Tauro, Tauro

Ahora usteds....

Con Orchata

Simple greens

Verses frozen beans

The last of the mo-ji-cama'

Dance the rain dance in my tang

Pina y pina

The ripe co-co-nut on the floor of the cut little hut

Simple greens

Verses frozen beans

Don’t taste like the skillet of my grandma hands

In her southern ways

Too much pork fat in those days

Caused her to sing simple

Songs

'Bout simple green verses

Frozen beans

In California....

Rock on, Exodus!



Another tasty tidbit: the PornOrchestra -- a recent development in the East Bay, they improvise music to bad mainstream porno flicks. I'm afraid I have to say it is an idea that is better on paper: in practice I found the music and the porn both a little tedious. The highlight was a 70's porno with the female figures blotted out, and some particularly thoughtful jazzy instrumental accompaniment. If you want a taste of this sort of thing, improving/ innovating soundtracks to original film is much better done by the Sprocket Ensemble. But hey! I got out of the house, down to that amazing Oakland cultural institution the Parkway Speakeasy Theater with all my fingernails and toenails painted (all the same color purple- I'm such a vamp!) and a nice slutty outfit to go with. I even had a date.



The SF Lesbian & Gay Film Festival -- which I stupidly eschewed for years because they don't have "bi" and "trans" in the title of the festival -- and the National Queer Arts Festival -- hopefully these two festivals will keep my social life fat and happy for the rest of the month. The only drawback is the initial immobilizing shock of sudden immersion in seas of queer people (including exes who I enjoy not seeing) that exhaust one with their combination of unfathomable optimism with unfathomable cattiness. You know, there you are, crying at a touching low-budget movie short about coming out to your family and someone behind you says "that is so GAY." I mean, I'm glad we're reclaiming "gay" as an invective for our own saccharine white-washing tendencies, but really. A little after-school-specialness isn't going to make queers irrelevant to the counterculture.



Or maybe it will. At an event Saturday Kate Bornstein gave a heady lecture about the poisonous nature of assimilation that seemed very old (can I say retro-90's yet?) which was followed, as if to illustrate the point, by a slide show by some ladies who have bought a farm in the country and got married there (and wanted to flaunt a little apolitical propertarian privilege). Going from Kate Bornstein to the married farmers gave me some serious vertigo: one, throwing her speech's pages angrily on the floor, shaking a fist at the violating nature of marriage constructs, and the other waving her spotless (still price-tagged) chrome hay hooks at the audience, boasting about how she had actually figured out how to use them to move hay. *I* never had hay hooks. I got hay burn all over my arms and legs every spring, loading hay with just gloves. God how we hated the dilettante cityfolk who fled NYC to the far reaches of the north to recover their sense of humanity by buying shiny toys and white-washed fences that would be auctioned and abandoned after five years. They never rode their horses enough to warrant owning the purebreds they invariably bought. But yet, at the end of the night, I still had more to talk about with the farmer wives than the communist demagogue. These awkward social mixes are just a necessary hazard of social life husbandry, I guess.

Another Stake in My Innocence



I have been doing personal ads on Craigslist and finally got curious enough to research what "420" meant. Of course I thought it was something much more interesting, involving more people and fewer clothes. The origin of it is pretty funny.



Said former pot-smoker Steve to the LA Times (from this article)...

The group [of friends] agreed to meet that afternoon after school at 4:20 p.m. by a campus statue of Louis Pasteur, he said, and head out to search for the marijuana patch [one of their brothers-in-law had given them]. "But one thing led to another," he laughed, "and suffice it to say we never found it. Every day we'd meet at 4:20 by this statue, and every day we'd just end up getting high and driving around for hours." Over time, the mere phrase "four-twenty"--exchanged in a hallway, or discreetly mentioned in the presence of teachers and parents--became their personal code for "time to get high," he said.

More Reasons Why The US Doesn't Completely Suck



The Banjo - our first indigenous instrument! Here is an article about women in the "banjo craze" of the 19th century.



Edward Gorey - indigenous Victorianesque weirdness! Here is the quiz to find out which Edward Gorey book you are.



Baseball and Softball - strangely relaxing, superstitious, and supremely geeky! Here is a nice and weird list of ways for baseball players to get good luck. Not through practice and hard work, silly.



Immigrant Pride - every Columbus Day! From the home of Gay Pride and Pagan Pride! Here is the lovely "Who's the Illegal Immigrant, Pilgrim" poster by San Francisco's own Yolanda M. Lopez -- this poster is usually widely wheatpasted for Immigrant Pride day, especially since the anti-immigrant legal changes in California in the mid 90's.



NYC Dyke Immigrant Jewish Theater At the Turn of the Century! Who would believe that the first depiction of homosexuality on the US public stage was in the early 1900's in the Jewish emigre theater: "The God of Vengeance" by Sholom Asch, featuring a lesbian relationship between a Jewish woman and a prostitute. Here is an article about "Schtick" by Sara Felder, the San Francisco show that brought this play's existence back to light a few years ago. The censors didn't go apeshit about this play until it hit Broadway in 1923, when I think the playwright was actually thrown in jail for his depiction of explicit lezzie love-- even though it was actually a conservative cautionary tale.



And now, the Slacker Stalker Guide to the Best in US Children's TV Entertainment:



Science Court aka Squigglevision - when I first got my own television in 1999 I was addicted only to Xena and Science Court. It was an instructional kids' television show illustrating complex science concepts in a satirical take-off on Law and Order, Ally McBeal, and other such self-important social commentary/ legal shows. I heart(ed) Science Court. Here you can sing along with some of their rockin' learning songs.



The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse - short-lived in the 80's: it was cancelled after John Kricfalusi (of later Ren & Stimpy Fame) had Mighty sniff some white powder and regain his strength. Wonderful, wonderful camp.




Count Duckula - ok, this one was British, not US-made. But such a goddamn hoot-- a flamboyantly gay vegetarian vampire duck. I love how he redecorates the family castle and has a flair for show tunes.



The Tick (cartoon) - no, I didn't have a TV when The Tick was on, but I was friends with fans with TVs and VHS recordings. I was a frequent houseguest. Maybe the better way to describe it would be "indigent waif." There are so many sites devoted to this cartoon, I'll just give you the adoring Jump the Shark list of gushing comments.




Reboot - ok, this isn't a US show either. It was made in Vancouver. But I include it because I had a crush on Hexidecimal. Here is a well-linked up page about this, the first TV series produced entirely with computer graphics. The characters had slow and wooden movement, but the voice actors were really witty. The main super evil villain was revealed to have a secret ambition to be a rock star at one point.



The Real Ghostbusters (cartoon) - just thinking about this cartoon brings back warm memories of curling up with a mug of cocoa and a honey sandwich after school. It was my evening ritual before going out to feed the horse and check the fence. It was my daily dose of candy-corn parapsychology. Sometimes they even had real little bits of myth and magic lore that would send me into research frenzies. Like on Buffy, much later, the demon hunters were often friends with the demons.



    and of course



Pinky and the Brain - of course, who couldn't love the little mousey take-off on Orson Welles with a mousey goofball sidekick/ lifepartner who is gay, gender dysphoric and telekinetic. Here is a list of those ever-useful Are-you-pondering-what-I'm-ponderings. When Pinky gave the Brain "the world" (a globe keychain) for Christmas one year, I actually cried.

826 Valencia -- Another Reason to Love the US



Granted, Dave Eggers' brainchild 826 Valencia (where I volunteer) and its fundraising store - "the pirate store" - for which these fabulous piratical signs were written - wouldn't have such a booming business if our public schools had smaller classes and kids had more options for extracurricular language skills development. They have something like twenty kids coming in for their free tutoring help after school these days.