expressions and attitudes

Laine and I went up to stay in the gold country, up in a vacation cabin by the Stanislaus National Forest. We didn't go alone. We went with a couple that we've known for a couple of years, Teri Mae and Katie. I guess we met them as friends of friends, mutual friends, something like that. Katie is an adoptee, as is Laine, and they used to walk around Lake Merritt and talk before Laine and I moved over to this part of town. We've mainly seen them at parties at their house and at games nights. They're both considerably younger than we are. They're planning to get married next year.

I mean MARRIED. They've planned this whole thing with their folks coming out from Boston and Ohio. They're going to have a reception of more than one hundred people. This is getting married like straight people. Maybe this is a generational thing, but I don't have any great brief for getting married, though I definitely think that queers should be able to get married and spend a fortune on it if they want to do it. But it still seems odd to know lesbians who are doing it. Like I said, it could be generational. I've know couples, lesbian couples who have been together for ages, who would laugh at the idea of spending all this cash and time for a wedding. There would probably be some muttering about heteronormarative behavior from the ex-separatists. But the marriage isn't the issue. It was the weekend.

Oh, there were lots of problems. Katie is a person who's not easily satisfied. She's also highly competitive. Now I'm not unfamiliar with the urge to compete. I'll be the first to admit it. But games are just that, games. They're nothing to get bent out of shape about. It's great to win. It's a drag to lose. But the point of a game is the play and the company. For Katie, it's more than that. She won't play a game after she's lost at it. She needs to play games she knows she can win.

That was bad enough. I won't go into all the small ways that she let us know she was not having a good time. The thing that really got me thinking was how she treats her girlfriend, Teri Mae. If you asked them, I think they'd say that they have a butch-femme relationship. That's not all that unusual, really. Laine and I have a b-f relationship, though it's not particularly marked, meaning I'm not a hard butch and she's decidely on the tomboy side of femme. Still the category is a useful one. It sets out certain ideas about gender identity and display. But I suspect that Katie identifies as butch because she thinks of masculinity as the winning team. Certainly the active, aggressive team. She slaps her partner on the ass, grabs her, runs her hands over her tits in the quasi-public space of the four of us. I gotta say I didn't much care for it and I don't think it's being butch. I think it's being a brute.

My idea of being a butch has developed over the years. If one concedes that gender is societally determined and that certain styles and gestures are assigned to different genders, then (in some ideal world) we can choose what gendered behaviors best fit our internal pictures of ourselves. The reality, of course, is that this is not a perfect world and that the choice of gendered behaviors brings some funky socio-political baggage and a whole set of unsavory assumptions about what it means to be a woman and what it means to be a man. Choosing b-f identities in this landscape means that the best you can do is to be thoughtful and avoid the tar pits of gendered behaviors as we perform these roles to greater and lesser extents.

I have always wanted to be a gentleman. Also, truth be told, I like the way that masculine desire can be modeled as active and direct. [I guess that's agency, but I also suspect this model is an artifact of when I grew up. I don't think it's "natural" or particularly inevitable, but we make our selves up out of the available material.] The whys of this? Who knows. Maybe I shouldn't have read "The Highwayman" at a early age. There's no telling why anyone ends up with the sexuality s/he has, why certain things are erotic, why certain roles seem to fit, why some people are attractive and others aren't. I am a butch because I don't completely feel "like a girl", whatever and however that means.

But as I watched Katie this last week, I also realized that in my head being butch is connected to some default behaviors and attitudes. At one point the lights in the cabin and all the houses around there went out. There was a note about this possibility in the long post the owner had sent out, so it must happen with some frequency up there. Katie was freaked out. It turns out that she's afraid of the dark out there in the country. She started wittering about the flashlights -- there were supposed to be two , but we only found one -- about the Coleman lights -- turned out to be a bad idea, no ventilation to speak of inside -- about what PG&E had to say about when the lights would come back on. All I could think was, "What a baby!" Butches are supposed to be brave, you see. This is not to say that non-butches aren't. That's laughable. But I had this (previously) unexamined belief that once you claimed the role, there are things that you should and shouldn't do and freaking out about the dark in a well-populated part of California is one of the shouldn'ts.

Wuss.

We had a nice time in the dark, watching the fire and talking. Once the lights came back on after a couple of hours, Katie wanted to play another game. I said no thanks and went up to bed.

The picture is of the approach to Bridalveil Falls in Yosemite.

getting the car towed away and other endings

I wrote a couple of months ago about my car not running. It sat in the driveway from December until two days ago, long enough for mold to accumulate under the wheels. I finally got it together to have someone come and tow it away. I had a brief hope, not really, that someone would be willing to pay something for the non-running carcass of a 1991 Chevy Corsica. But in the end, I called junker service I found online and on Thursday, sometime after noon, a guy came by, took the title and took the car.

It was my dad's car. My father died back in 1998. In January. He died of a heart attack, but it would probably be more accurate to say that he died of years of drinking too much. He died in his favorite chair, the last of a series of recliners that sat in the living room of the apartment I grew up in. The location never changed, The chair was well positioned in front of the tv set and a nice distance from the speakers. My dad probably had two great pleasures as he aged, music and movies. I have his reel-to-reel tapes of 78s and his videos of movies that he caught on cable. He liked things like Shogun, the complete Smiley series on PBS, Forrest Gump (though he bought that), My Fair Lady (mainly because he was a big fan of Henry Higgins, uh, Rex Harrison), practically anything with Cary Grant in it, and movie musicals. My dad loved movies. He told me years ago about how he'd gone to some matinee as a kid and that he liked the movie so much he stayed and saw it three times. My grandmother was wild, worrying about what might have happened to him. I see him, a small boy happy, sitting in the dark, watching the fantasy unroll in front of him.

I understand that in him because I love movies too. There's a lot I don't understand about my father and that I never will. I think, when I look over the movies he collected, by buying or copying, when I see his Calvin and Hobbes collection, the Pogos, and the other odds and ends that I've kept after he died, that he had a hard time figuring out how to be a man. He wanted the authority of maleness, but he wasn't attracted to being a brute. We watched The Wizard of Oz every year when I was a little kid. My sister and I loved it, but he did too. I think he was essentially gentle and liked being silly, but felt that wasn't ok for a man, especially a black man of his time. He was a geek before there was a name or a place for it. I think he'd have been happier growing up now. I miss him.

He died not long after I got my PhD. He was so proud of me. When the tow guy took the car away, I was trying to remember different drives in it. Although I was reaching for times after my dad's death, I remembered one time before he died when I was finishing up on my doctorate. I had to drive to Princeton to get a signature. He offered me his car, although I hadn't asked for it. I drove down to Princeton and back to Ithaca on a rainy day, listening to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. It was a kind thing for my dad to have done. It was his constant and unobstrusive support that I remember now. A support that I didn't appreciate enough at the time and that I wish I'd thanked him for back when he could have heard it.

At the end, the car had more than a hundred sixty-three thousand miles on it and oil was leaking into the engine. I got it the semester after I started the job at XXXX university and now that the job is at an end, it's only right that the car is going, going gone too.