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Do You Like Your Queer Youth Extra Krispy or Just Fried?

The sun and I are not friends. There is a reason I have an affinity for the nighttime and the moon - mainly that when I spend time in the sun, I turn red as a lobster and later peel badly. But on 5 May 2001, I spent an afternoon in the sun for a damn good reason, to hear speak one of the people whose books has affected me greatly. You might be sitting there and think, oh, Nancy Garden, who wrote Annie On My Mind, or Rita Mae Brown, author of Rubyfruit Jungle and Venus Envy. Nope, I saw a man/woman/both/neither named Leslie Feinberg, who wrote Stone Butch Blues, speak at Northampton Pride 2001. As much fun as it was to see the mayor of Northampton play guitar while singing a parking-ticket related filk of Melissa Ferrick’s lesbian classic "Drive", I was there to see Leslie Feinberg in all hir he-she glory. The gayboy friend I went to Pride with didn’t even know who s/he was, even as classmates and teachers of mine came up to gush with me about being able to hear Leslie speak.

Why should I so respect and admire someone who looks like a middle-aged guy? Well... first off, I admire my dad, so I guess that counts as admiration of a middle-aged guy, but Leslie Feinberg is someone leading the life I want. The thing is, I don’t know if I’m strong enough to have the kind of life that I want. Am I strong enough to be who I want to be? That’s the question plaguing me. Oh... and I also rather need to know who and what it is that I want to be.

My Options - What Options? What Are These Options Of Which You Speak?

When I came out as a dyke at the end of my junior year of high school, I thought I had finally found a place where I belonged. Part of me does belong in the gay community, just as a part of me belongs in the Pagan community and another part in the online community. But as I grow older, learn more, I feel like there’s something missing - something that I lost a long time ago and need to find again. Something I lost while wearing a Catholic schoolgirl’s uniform and to the well-meaning friends and hostile enemies who tried to help or make me fit in.

If you hear me talk about when I was little, you’ll never hear me refer to my "girlhood" or any such dreck. I was a child - not much more specific than that. I was a tomboy running in the woods and fields with pigtails flying. I was an outcast from the cliques of little girls and boys, outcast from one for being too boyish, from the other for being too girly. There was no middle ground in the politics of childhood, and I found myself constantly in-between and outside. There’s no middle ground in adolescence or adulthood either, I’ve found. Classmates and friends used to find it hilarious when I was mistaken for a guy. I remember standing in a shuttle in the Dallas airport on my way to Mexico with classmates, being "sir’d" and having two classmates break out into hysterical laughter. A week later I finally embraced the term "lesbian" only to reject it a couple years later in favor of "dyke."

So where does that leave this "mannish," "masculine" "woman"? Should I change my name to something more "manly" than Beth and pass as I often do? The strange looks I get often on going into the Ladies room is something to make even my most conservative friends think twice. Or should I continue on the path I’m on, a butch dyke in wifebeater and plaid button-down shirt? I feel like I’m drowning in the sea of identity.

I want to be like Lazarus, and rise from the dead. I want the part of me that everyone has told how to be, to die. I want that part of me to die and the part of me that has been struggling for freedom to escape. I want to finally be myself. I’m not sure how. I haven’t had a lot of practice.

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