When did you know?
I might answer in 2018, when I literally broke out in hives over being seen as straight.
Or 2016, my jealousy rising hot and frightening within me, when I’d see queer couples loving each other out loud.
Or 2013, when I could tentatively trace the outline of what a deeper relationship with my friend might feel like.
1989 when my babysitter became my goddess-idol. 1992 when I waxed rhapsodic over my butch camp counselors, and couldn’t wait to grow up to be exactly like them.
1994 when there were crushes on boys, boys who looked like they’d walked off the set of an Herbal Essences commercial. 1995 when I was mesmerized by the young butch actress who played Busy on the Canadian series Ready or Not, a casual Google leading me to discover that she also grew up to be gay as hell.
1998 when I was strangely comfortable being bullied and called queer, even leaning into it. 2001 when I tried to date a very sweet and nice boy who I liked very much and broke up with immediately. And a year later, when my bone marrow burst into spangled red confetti when a stage manager in Oakleys and work boots called me hot.
These moments of ecstasy and embodiment are strung together like popcorn garland in hindsight. In the thick of it, I was mired in the ever-watchful male gaze, embodied by MTV, Seventeen, Dawson’s Creek, and the ritual hedonism of spring break.
But in the stillness of my room, my heart beating along to TLC and Sarah McLachlan and Buffy Summers, my deep-within whispered—surely this profound bone-deep pining couldn’t be for boys.
As a theatre kid who was unilaterally terrible at sports, I wasn’t around the rough-and-tumble athletic girls who come out soon after high school. Instead, I was confusedly crushing on gay boys in the ensemble of the spring musical, dancing alongside pretty, thin Broadway hopefuls with over-blushed cheeks and bouncing curls.
I suffered from a chronic case of Butch Deprivation.
Never quite fitting in the typical tomboy-to-lesbian pipeline, I missed all the obvious on-ramps: counselors at Girl Scout Camp, softball, band, Women’s Studies, grrl rock folk music, crafting. Instead I did theatre and public speaking and hung out with a shitty writer’s room worth of snobby, intellectual Sad Boys who at once objectified and ignored me.
I knew I was Other—I just thought that Other meant poet, punk, feral theatre raccoon.
I was never in a place Where The Lesbians Are, and so I was not prepared for the electric current that would whip through my whole being when I found myself where I truly belonged.
It was 2012 when the long-running Fat Girl Flea Market became the overwhelmingly-gay Big Fat Flea, and for just one day a year over the next five years, those seismic spikes in queerness would rock my whole world.
Upon arriving at NYU with my bags of donations, the doors swing open, and the breath simply vacates my body.
The room is abuzz with more flannels, undercuts, sleeve tattoos and nose rings than I’ve ever seen in my life. A butch with a floppy teal faux-hawk wearing a Pussy Riot shirt approaches me, and time stands still.
I’ve found Butch Nirvana, I thrill, grinning like a maniac while she unfolds and admires my clothes, her twisty corkscrew smile setting my heart at a gallop.
I’ve never felt around men the way I feel in this sea of butches.
I can no longer write it off as hormonal hiccups: I have quietly left myself a lifelong breadcrumb trail of queerness. I gulp down a grateful breath as all these scattered popcorn moments suddenly string together into a glorious rainbow garland.
It flutters, stills, and then, the awful weight of it—of what she must see.
Just a straight girl, a straight and married girl with blonde hair and no tattoos and just ear piercings, a straight girl who listened to N*SYNC and never played JV or worked at the Women's Center or even got champagne-drunk and kissed a friend.
She says something else that I don’t hear as her hair moves, slow-mo, seaweed dancing in water.
“I said, I love your style. So femme.”
It takes a moment for the lead balloon on my heart to shift. I lift my head again to meet her gaze. Her smile is gentle, welcoming, and somehow, she sees. She sees 1989 and 1992 and 1998 and 2001 and 2003, and every telling yearbook picture in-between.
There is a word for me, and it isn't ‘straight.’ Femme fills my senses, heady and dizzy like lilies, gathering everything together in a bouquet of poetry and romanticism and softness and ribbons and lipstick and plumage and Otherness.
Femme, she calls me. And I know.
xx Jen