Hubris and the Poison Pen

I sent a piece of poetry I had written to an East Coast based heavy-hitting femme activist/authoress. I don’t know her and I’m quite sure she had no prior knowledge of my existence.

Why did I write her? Hubris, pure and simple. I am quite capable of hubris and when it comes to the final analysis that is what it was. Pure hubris.

I had been rereading some of her work, I thought with a serious eye to critical theoretical analysis of the place of her oeuvre in the history of the fight for civil rights for nonheterosexual people. As I read, I was touched over and over by the pain in her writing, the longing for her voice and the voices of all femmes to be heard, cherished, and encouraged,

The complaint was well emphasized in essay after essay. I took her seriously. She had fought the lockstep of the androgyne lesbians, afraid of or uninterested in the butch-femme dynamic, who made butch-femme couples outlaws in the nonheterosexual community. It broke my heart to see that such a beautiful femme who had struggled, seemingly so alone, for so many years for the good of the community, felt so alone in the fight.

I am a butch-loving femme, too. I so understood the bias of the “lesbian dress-code police” and the physical danger of presenting oneself as a true, butch-centered femme in a heterosexist world. I understood how it was to feel the eyes of straight men on me; straight men who believed, in their arrogance, that I was available, if not directly to them, to some other bio-man -- when nothing could be farther from the truth.

So I wrote her, I wrote to tell her that I admired what she had done. I admitted that I wasn’t sure the email would ever reach her but I wanted to send out my praise to the universe if to no one else. I also sent her a brief poem about the love a queer femme for a butch woman.

So here is the hubris part. I thought she might appreciate what I thought were words of encouragement from a like-minded soul. I thought she would like to know that there is at least one other femme who is aging and disabled and who has felt the sting of censure from both the inner community of lesbians and the outer community of America and has neither recoiled from her desire nor been silenced herself. Well, let’s see what my hubris got me.

To my great surprise she answered promptly, within a day. She first wrote that I couldn’t possibly understand her life there in the East. So far, so good, I was sure she was right, I live in a dusty sh*t-kickin’ town in the great arid West. No urbane sensibility here. We are worlds apart in most ways and there is little chance that we will ever intersect again.

But then things went downhill fast; in fact, she came down on me like a ton of bricks. She concluded that I had committed the greatest of all femme crimes -- I, she insinuated, had been trying to use her -- for what she didn’t say, so I haven’t a clue. But surely to accuse another femme of being a user rather than a giver is the lowest blow one femme can lay upon another.

She also seemed to think that I was making a demand on her of some sort to bend her schedule to my timetable – again I haven’t a clue what she thought my goal in this would be or what my timetable was.

She next told me that she found the use of a particular word I had chosen “disturbing.” It is curious to me that she let the word I had used push her buttons because I had only used it to express a certain feeling I had that she would probably never see the email due to what in my experience are the vagaries of untried electronic communication links. Who knows where stuff goes, to a webmaster, to an untended mailbox, to a mailbox that sorts to spam, to the Ethernet? I sure don’t know. I didn’t even expect a response. I didn’t need one, but I did hope that if my words found her that she would feel a bit heartened.

Despite her dismissive tone and stinging words, which told me that she had no interest in what I had to say based on some judgement she had made of my character and that she would in the future dismiss whatever I had to say without consideration, she ended on a surprisingly gracious note, wishing me well in my future endeavors.

I’m sure she was just having a bad day when she responded in such an unfriendly way to my email, but I shudder to think about the damage that would have been done to a weaker woman who found herself in the way of this had-a-bad-day salvo. If I was a less powerful femme, one who was not quite so certain of her talent and power, if I had risked more in sending the note of praise and support, I can imagine I might have folded up and never written a thing again. If I had been a more vulnerable femme, with less-sure footing, this might have silenced me.

So, I’ll keep my hubris to myself for a while and not presume that what I have to offer could ever be of consequence to everyone. The heavy-hitting femme made sure I knew, in every way, that she didn’t need or desire my sympathy or praise. Fair enough, I say. Still it is ironic that a femme who has complained so long and loud about the silencing of femmes could have come so close to silencing one of her own kind.