Best Sex Writing 2008

by Rachel Kramer Bussel

  That’s why many among this generation of educated and intelligent young people choose to live in the moment, justifying their party lifestyle as resistance to the authorities, as a cry for democracy. In response the government has displayed a little more tolerance toward their Western-inspired activities and pro-Western attitudes. Call it a compromised democracy, one that enables people to speak effectively through their vote for parliamentarians and the president while ceding ultimate control to an unelected, all-powerful supreme leader.

  As a nation, Iran is wary of the interference of foreign powers. During the twentieth century, the country’s path to democracy was often thwarted by the goals of great powers, the United States included, and by homegrown authoritarians who seized power in the name of social progress and national security. Today the country feels threatened again. If the current nuclear dispute serves as a pretext for the West to impose sanctions or take actions even more drastic, the regime will have all the excuse it needs to strangle civil rights and avert—or at least delay—its own demise. Yet a more open and less confrontational approach would make it more likely that the country can stay on the path to democracy. Last December’s local elections showed that few are happy with Ahmadinejad, but that doesn’t mean the regime is in danger of collapse, and a hard-line policy out of Washington will only help prop it up. Instead, an approach that invites dialogue and perhaps other inducements is far more likely to persuade authorities to observe human rights and encourage a population that is actually very pro-Western to push for greater freedom. The time is ripe.

  The Ebrahimi affair has damaged the government-contrived facade of ubiquitous ultraconservatism, and it’s no longer a question of if but when the veil will be lifted on the real Iran. Thanks to an amateur sex video that has delivered a direct hit to the status quo, the government’s propaganda has been laid as bare as the lovers on the screen.

  Surface Tensions

  Jen Cross

  After nearly ten years of working actively to be seen and recognized as not just dyke, but as butch, I’ve put on a skirt again, and not just because I like how it looks, but because I want someone bigger and more masculine to bend me over, push the skirt above my hips, and fuck me with it still on. Someone like my lover. Someone who, coincidentally or not, is, like my stepfather, also bigger and more masculine than me.

  A decade is a long time to shut down the body.

  I pass as a white, heterosexual woman, and do not pass as a victim/survivor of sexual abuse. Or maybe it all depends on which direction you’re talking: passing “in” to visibly marked identity, or passing “out” of awareness, moving stealthily? Part of passing as a straight woman is not showing her wounds (she won’t attract a man that way). No, wait. Straight girls are supposed to show their wounds, are at least supposed to be weaker-than, just not too needy; not so wounded that they can’t still take good care of someone else.

  Anyway, after not passing (as straight) and passing (as a vaguely masculine dyke) for many years, it has been difficult and painful for me to step back into the mainstream, heterosexual, heteronorma-tive view—to become the seen and unseen thing, the remarked upon and the unmarked/unremarkable, that most abhorred by and pitied by dykes (more so even than straight men): the straight girl. As my lover is a passing butch, we are often read as a straight couple, possibly even by other queers. This peculiar invisibility, juxtaposed all over me with the ostensible safety of hetero-privilege (however questionable that privilege becomes, given that we are an interracial couple), drapes across my shoulders and weighs me down.

  When I first came out, I slowly moved from girly-feminine to as masculine as I could make myself without giving up hoop earrings and the occasional night on the town (for the drag ball) in full girl dress. My hair got shorter and shorter, my clothes got boxier. I bought men’s shoes, sports bras; longed to rid myself of my breasts and hips, and wanted to become the boyish butch dyke, the passing boy, the boy. I loved it when I got called Sir, and never got upset when someone was confused at my entering the women’s bathroom. I was delighted. I thought I’d accomplished something, had successfully passed as the kind of dyke I so longed to be and thought I was supposed to be.

  As for so many others, as far as I was concerned, dyke was synonymous with masculine woman, which worked just fine for me. As a teenager, the femininity I learned was entirely shaped by my stepfather and his racist, classist sexism (and what sexism isn’t racist and classist and more, all informing the others until we’re tied together in knots of oppression that shape us, pull us side to side, or side by side?). I wanted to put as much distance as possible between my surviving, queer self and the construction of my stepfather’s that (I believed) I’d been. I thought feminine belonged to him. I took off my girlskin. I wanted to slice off all the curves, remove the breasts, take off the ass that he’d touched. This desire just happened to mesh smoothly with the longing to fit in as a dyke.

  See, I wanted to pass as marked. Moments of recognition, of queer visibility, snared me into my desired sense of self. After my stepfather decided to teach me how porn stars please their men, I learned to hide in plain sight, became the hyper-heterosexual/ super-sexualized smart teenage girl. “Maybe a little eccentric,” thought the teachers at school, the acquaintance-friends, the guidance counselors; it never crossed their minds to ask if I was being raped at home nearly every day. During that time, I was invisible in the ways I wanted to be seen, invisible as someone being tortured at home, as a captured child. After coming out (from under him and as queer), I wanted to be seen; if I wasn’t going to be marked as a survivor by how I looked and moved through the world; by God, I was going to be seen as a dyke, and that meant becoming a butch. I internalized the identity, came out as trans, even, to various people and communities. I got read as a teenage boy or young man now and then and loved it. This was what I understood dykeness to mean; I felt the femmes were frauds, clueless, and, most problematic, not marked.

  I hoped that homophobia would come to my aid in this scheme of visibility, and wanted, just once, for someone to ask me if my stepfather had “made me this way” when he raped me. Made me gay. Turned me queer. I had all my defiant, indignant, glorious answers ripe and ready, but no one ever asked.

  I wanted to believe in my surface and yours, I wanted to be brutally exposed and I wasn’t, as it turns out, but I was: every time I walked down the sidewalk, I took for granted a queer visibility that others may or may not have actually perceived. It just wasn’t rent from me, that enacted self: I was no threat to anyone. It was a scene. It was something possible, at least, that tension between who I was hidden internally and who I was on my surface.

  These days, I no longer pass as gay, unless I’m at a dyke event with my butch lover close by, and even then I don’t pass as inherently gay, but gay-by-association. I very often find that my attempts to make eye contact with a stranger who I read as a dyke are misread (as the staring of yet one more confused straight girl?). How many femmes did I ignore/dismiss/remain ignorant of during my first ten years as an out dyke? Now I know.

  When I was a boy, even though I still had to actively come out as a survivor, at least I was (I thought) seen as something. These days, I have to come out as survivor and come out as gay. Now, what’s seen first are all the things my stepfather remarked upon, lavished attention upon, built and formulated himself. I want to vomit them off my body sometimes, instead of just battening them down with tight undergarments: breasts, hips, ass, neckline: body. These days, I am again the unhappy recipient of all the trappings and charming indications that I pass as a female: smacky kissing sounds from random men, “Nice Big Tits,” come-ons, invitations out on dates, eye contact that isn’t simply received as Hello but as Let’s Go Fuck Right Now, gazes that stroke across my body, How You Doin’, Baby? Where’s Your Man?

  What about the whole incest thing? What does it mean to pass as a survivor? I mean, to be read as a survivor? Given that so many of us in this fucking culture have survived som
e kind of sexual abuse—do we all pass? It’s the norm? And still, the experience/ identity is silenced, unless you’re crying all the time, can’t have sex, are unable to be intimate (and who doesn’t have intimacy issues in this time of torture, television and target marketing?). If you’re relatively functional, forget it. No one wants to talk about survivor-hood except your therapist, and she’s getting paid.

  What does it mean to be marked survivor in the same way as we’re marked gender, or sexuality, race, class? Is it possible to wear the identity like clothing? Is it all in the speech, a lingo peppered with words like triggered and meetings and group references and self-forgiveness? Would a stranger ever be able to identify this identity without someone having to take on the disheveled defeated defective head-bent-down shuffle of ashamed victim? Can you walk with your head held high and shoulders back and still be read as a survivor?

  Can you wear a dress and still be read as a dyke?

  The answer to both of these questions, I think, is No.

  Victims of sexual abuse learn to pass as something—perfectionists, inherently damaged persons, or both. Both draw the attention away from the abuse. Like leeching.

  You can’t see what this is that’s hiding me. It’s a weird shroud coloring my vision but not yours. I learn to pass as a human being, as not-a-molester, as not-a-rapist.

  How can I claim for myself what is lost? How can I be alone in this cadence? Outside it is crisp, clean, lonely blue-gray night turning into morning, turning the regressive forgetting, aggressive outstanding faces of night, surely sleeting.

  The survivor has nothing but her body to put between herself and the captor/rapist. My body passes between us while I escape elsewhere (sometimes) during the assaults themselves. My body is the only thing of danger, and the only thing I have to wield. I learn to pass it elsewhere, learn to pass it between myself and others, learn to control its passing, its deliberation and consideration.

  The armor is like safety. The armor is like rock and we have no walls to hide behind. We become the armor. We become the rock. We pass ourselves as we would have you take us. We create ourselves in our own image and decry liberalism and defy licentiousness and take on ourselves as our own best enemy and call ourselves something like whole and declare our own names true. And some of us are still hiding. To be rid of him and acceptable to you, to the sense of you that we have integrated in ourselves.

  Lots of femmes describe “the nod”—the look, the smile of recognition—that acknowledgment they don’t receive. The “What are you doing here?” look that they get in its place. Just recently, another self-identified butch says, Hey, if I see you in the video store, and you look feminine to me, I’m gonna assume that you’re straight. Meaning, of course, I’m going to exclude you from my community. And this from someone who supposedly has some understanding of butch and femme, the history, the reality and the existence of femme dykes.

  It takes work to continue to ignore the fact that some self-identified dykes/lesbians/queer women are not masculine-acting/appearing or in some surface appearance/visual way, gender-non-normative. We are many of us gender non-normative behaviorally, and when those actions/behaviors are noticed and taken into account, we might be given the benefit of some doubt (or maybe just taken for a “right-on straight girl”?). But it’s surface I’m talking about, the embodied body and the tactics of exclusion, of defining community with a glance, calling you in or out.

  I often come to the decision to exclude butches and other masculine-gendered dykes/lesbians/queers from my gaze. I will not allow them acceptability into my community. Granted, my little individual protest doesn’t matter when my eyes aren’t attended to in the first place (and, you know, my protest comes to a quick end when I choose to acknowledge my butch lover). Still, it gives me a little stab of pleasure to willfully not-see these demanding revelations of recognized/recognizable queerness. It’s true that, for a split second, I want every butch I see silently dripping desire only momentarily because, outside of that quiet vault, I don’t want to give them the power of my satisfaction, the visual cues of my desire, while they’re ignoring me with such precision. I watch them, though, when I think they’re not looking, like they’re a silent salient separate species, like they don’t belong to me: they’ve become some remote tribe or they always were. And when I say I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction, I mean that I don’t want to give them any more power over me: the power of recognition, of surety, the power of the masculine over the feminine.

  But move away from my lust and get back to the tactics of exclusion and inclusion: to ignore, to consciously and willfully avoid acknowledgment—is that also a survival skill, internalized by those who are more consistently noticed and attended to by society at large, demonized, hated; a desire to protect, as well as internalized self-hate? She can’t be like (as bad as) me; look at her. Or is it self-protective, like: The last time I hit on a woman I wasn’t 100 percent certain was queer, or who didn’t look gay like me, I got the shit kicked out of me by (insert your choice of misogynist male “protectors” here). Or is it the (identity) politics of similarity: We’re just like everybody else, and if you want a piece of this pie, you better be like me. Is it really just an internalization of the wholesale ’70s rejection of all things apparently and ostensibly patriarchal, the gender-neutral (read: butch) rejection of femininity that the whole community was supposed to conform to—notice how the masculine leads the charge again? And didn’t I do it too? Who is to blame here when we flow through the gendered this way?

  I’m trying to figure out the root cause of this active denial on the part of so many in my dyke “community”(-ies) who deny/ignore the existence of femmes, of other dykes who (seem to) look like everything that various foremothers fought against. And me, as well. Didn’t I ignore and even despise femmes? How can I come up now with an I and a we and an us and a them and put myself on the side of the girls? I’m lost here, in my indignation and fear.

  It’s one thing to have a man (straight? apparently—he passes as straight, to me) assume that I am straight. It’s a different enactment of power (over? under?) for a visibly-read dyke to assume that I am not gay.

  In becoming a boy, I had a desire to be seen in all the ways my stepfather would hate, as everything he would oppose: un-femininity, un-selection of men. I espoused everything I thought my mother should have, in her claim to feminism. I wanted to be everyone’s stereotype lesbian. When I described myself as looking like an average dyke, just like every other lesbian in town, it was a thoughtless statement, betraying my willful blindness to femme dykedom (and all the other dykenesses that don’t look like the currently popular close-cropped-boi thing) and revealed a desire to become that which I described myself as.

  It was a mistake, and it wasn’t. I enjoyed the visibility, calculated and treacherous. Queerness was, for me, the opposite of my survivor-hood, which no one could see, because as a part of surviving itself, I had to learn how to pass as unproblematic.

  I created my dykeness as a problem, wore it like a skin, made it visible. Masculine or butch dykeness was a salve, something put on, protective and predatory. I was turning the tables.

  We’re not supposed to do that, and if we do, we’re not supposed to say it. Party line in femme-butch community is the (still, continued) sense and representation of an innate gender, something we’ve always known about ourselves (even if we didn’t have the words for it) and always held true to, never betrayed. Betrayal. I am that betrayer. I talk about when I was a boy, and how I’ve shifted. I lay claim to both/and.

  I kept a copy of Joan Nestle’s The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader on my bookshelf for seven or eight years before I read the femme parts. I found them offensive, suspect, inconsequential, weak, catty, whiny. Damning stereotypes that could be applied only to me, the too-vehement displacement of my own internal judgment. And now, I am unlearning all that I trained myself into with respect to dykeness (that, yes, began with straight stereotyping, the stepfat
her’s hostility toward dykes, my own desire to become what it was I was attracted to, having conflated those, unable to separate my own power as distinct and unique from that which I desired).

  Does it make sense to be angry with “my” community because I don’t pass in my own eyes?

  It occurred to me last night that I just feel resigned about my gender, resigned to my sexuality, like I’m tired of fighting (for) something I can’t have. I’m petulant and scared but mostly off-the-side resigned, out in the way-back machine, deep shuffling into the fact that I didn’t win: I am a girl, and I am seen and hidden as a girl, off to the inside, far in the guts of gender. I no longer “work” as queer, and I am tired of trying and being disappointed. The everyday reach for eye contact, for Hello, for recognition, like it’s somebody else’s business to accept me into my own tribe. These are my tired eyes. Leave me the cues and I’ll use them, but I’m wrecked on my own shores.

  It’s like that old saying: you can’t please anybody, so you might as well be alone. (Actually, I don’t think that’s the saying. I think it’s: you can’t please everybody, so you might as well just please yourself. Whatever. They’re both exhausting.)

  I am so tired of disappearing after I say, This is how I am and feel, and those others reply, No, we don’t think you really fit. How do I unlearn that undeliverance?