MARKING OUR BODIES Remaking Our Lives

When I was coming out, a tattoo and a doubly-pierced right ear was a sign of being a lesbian. This seems silly now, I admit, but at twenty and twenty-one these were important identity expressions to my peer group and me along with Birkenstocks, thick wool socks (I came out in Michigan), and large army fatigues held up with wide leather belts. To this day, when I wear that uniform, I feel like a real lesbian.

Each generation defines itself with physical and external markers of identity. All have profound meaning to the people who are marked and to the people who create the marks. I welcome new generational markers – even if I don’t always understand them. (I admit, tongue piercing and navel piercing were initially uncomfortable and foreign to me; though I remember the way some recoiled from my large, comfortable shoes.) I only become concerned when the markers of identity result in permanent and unchangeable actions to our bodies.

I’ve taken those actions. One tattoo and three holes between my two earlobes. Do I regret either? No. Would I do it again? Perhaps not.

Part of my discomfort comes from feminism. As a feminist, I want to embrace my body as it is – and I want other people to do that. As a feminist, I’m uncomfortable with breast augmentation. I don’t think that permanent body alterations are something to support or celebrate. I hold this philosophy to a pretty strict standard in my life. Sure, I’ve shaven my legs on occasion (and the wifey wishes I would do it more, truth be told), but I’ve not done much that permanently alters my body.

This brings me to my concern: increasing people – and particularly young people, which to me still means under thirty-five or forty – are chosing to transition from one sex to another. On one hand, I support people’s ability to have control over their bodies and to express gender in whatever way that they wish. On the other hand, I’m concerned about permanent body alterations.

I worry about the increasing medicalization of our bodies and of gender. Women and queers have never been served by the medical establishment and yet increasing it seems we turn to doctors to give us bodies to help navigate a world in which gender roles are narrow prescribed and offer little fluidity and flexibility for a moment or a lifetime.

Our experience of gender and gender roles is related not only to how we understand the world personally but also to how other around us understand and interpret the world. Lots of the butch women I came out with twenty years ago embraced their butchness because of a feminist analysis which said that gender roles weren’t working – for women or for men, but that it was fine to be gender non-conforming. Today these same women might be told by prevailing analyses that their identity is transgender. That’s fine—if it is an identity that works, I support people’s ability to self-identify. Today, however, more is at stake than self-identity. People are changing their bodies and their sex through medical intervention.

That concerns me. I’m worried about a construction of gender that requires permanent body alteration. My body isn’t perfect as it is and I do things to change it – I change my clothes, I work out, I use lotions and lots of little potions from small pots, but all of that can be undone in a short amount of time – none of it is permanent. Are we sure that surgery and hormone therapy to permanently alter the body is an essential expression of gender identity?

Many won’t be happy that I’ve asked the question, but I think it must be asked. We need dialogue about the costs and benefits of medical interventions and the constructions of sex and gender in our queer community.

Meanwhile, I’ve dispensed with the second earring in my ear. I loved it for the years that I wore it. Today it doesn’t serve me. I’m glad that I could just stop wearing it when I wanted. I want for all of the other young queers to have the same choices as their lives change and evolve.

Julie R. Enszer is a writer and poet. She lives in University Park, MD. You can read more of her work, including her blog, at www.JulieREnszer.com.

This is column #16 dated November 27, 2007 in the series, CIVILesbianIZATION.

Word Count: 698

WILL CONGRESS EVER PASS PRO-LGBT LEGISLATION? Reflections on ENDA

The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) passed out of the House of Representatives on November 7, 2007 with a vote of 235-184. In order to become law, it must of course also pass the Senate and be signed by the President. Most anticipate that those two things will not happen this legislative cycle. The version of ENDA that was voted out of the House is one that many advocates object to because it excluded gender identity language, which would have provided workplace protections to transgender people.

There has been an entire brouhaha surrounding ENDA that’s been mostly documented in the blogosphere though The New York Times article provided a good summary of it as well. I’ve watched these events unfold with astonishment. First, I am incredibly proud of the GLBT movement for standing on principle. The actions of United ENDA and the nearly four hundred organizations that worked to preserve gender identity in the bill are awe inspiring to me. I have never in my twenty years of being a participant / observer seen the queer community speak with such a united and clear voice. I am inspired by the number of organizations who have taken a stand in support of a transgender inclusive ENDA and called on their members to do the same. This is the movement about which I dreamed; I am proud to be a part of it.

I was amazed and slightly baffled by Representative Barney Frank’s actions. It seems that he had the opportunity to demonstrate the perfect “object lesson” about the value of Democrats to the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community, but that it has now been botched. Generally, yes, queers vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. Lately, however, people like me—and others—question that loyalty in light of the waffling of Democrats on marriage. The script that could have played out is this: ENDA passes in the Senate and the House and then is vetoed by the President. The House and Senate are run by Democrats; the President is a Republican. Who will you vote for in 2008? The answer would have been obvious.

Instead, we were embroiled in wrangling with politicians about pragmatism and principle. It seems to me that politics should be about both, and politicians should find ways to hold onto both pragmatism and principle at all times. Ironically, one of the politicians who first introduced the law to protect gays and lesbians from workplace discrimination, in 1974 on the fifth anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, was Representative Bella Abzug, the gentlewoman from New York. She was a politician with vision able to be both pragmatic and rooted in principle.

Instead of a transcendent political moment, or even an instructive political moment, the passage of ENDA was a divisive political moment. Certainly, the opposition to excluding gender identity from the bill was inspiring, to me and others, but the outcome was disheartening.

An important “object lesson” could still emerge from ENDA in 2007. That lesson may be more enlightening and may, in the long run, catapult queer liberation forward. I don’t think that it is going to be one that strengthens or stabilizes queer support for a Democratic candidate for President. Rather the lesson may be about unity, loyalty, and commitment. I hope that we are able to see it and learn it.


Julie R. Enszer is a writer and poet. She lives in University Park, MD. You can read more of her work, including her blog, at www.JulieREnszer.com.

This is column #15 dated November 13, 2007 in the series, CIVILesbianIZATION.

Word Count: 552

ANTICIPATING THE BIG 4-0

I rarely say no to myself. I don’t deny my whims and desires. In fact, in the realm of things that I want to do, there is very little that I haven’t done. I don’t believe in living a life deferred – or a dream deferred as the original poem states. Despite this, as I approach the milestone age of forty, I’m thinking about what I haven’t done and would like to before I transition, by some measures, into my middle age.

It will happen in January of 2010 and, truth be told, I’m quite excited about it. I’ve never feared growing older and I don’t want to adopt that fear as the years progress. In fact, I want to be one of those people who embrace age and its corollary, experience. To achieve the experience part of the equation, I’m thinking about what I haven’t done that I want to do. I’m making a list of things to do before forty.

A dear friend suggested adrenaline activities, which are, I fear, woefully absent from my bank of life experiences. Sky diving, bungee jumping, tight-rope walking. I’ve done none of these. Nor do I particularly want to, but the point is taken about adrenaline. So I’m mulling those and definitely will put one on my list. At this point, I’m leaning to parasailing, but who can tell what might strike my fancy in the next months leading up to the big day.

I also want to dye my hair. Not brown to cover the gray that is now coming in by the handfuls, but pink or purple. A color that will shock and disarm. Perhaps green? I want to have an arresting presence for a few weeks before I cut it all off. I’ve never dyed my hair before, and it seems like a life experience that I am missing, so that’s on my list.

I’d like to do a thorough hair removal. Generally I’m a hairy gal. I don’t shave much but for one day, except for the hair on my head (dyed bright red?), I’d like to be hairless. Everyone tells me that the one hairless day will be paid for with a few weeks of intense discomfort afterward as it all grows back. That’s doesn’t seem to dissuade me, however.

I’m careening into more hedonism as I approach forty, and I embrace that. More partying and revelry all around. I didn’t do as much of this as I could have in my twenties so I’m reversing that part of the life cycle and staying out late getting drunk and sleeping in the next morning.

I’m trying to figure out how to honor all of the people in my life who have died before reaching forty. A group of gay men with whom I came out who have passed away – primarily from AIDS but other medical conditions as well. My sister, who should have been right behind me in approaching forty, but isn’t here to share in it. I want all of them to be present as I celebrate this milestone. So I regularly invoke them, calling on them to celebrate with me.

Suddenly, I’m interested in people who are eighty. What were they doing at forty? How did they spend the last forty years? What lessons do their lives have for me? I’m trying to soak that knowledge up in the way that I studied the forty year olds when I was twenty.

I want to speak another language fluently. I want to read more books that matter and change my life. I’d like to be an expert in something. I want to travel to every continent—at least once, some many times. I want to create my own list of the wonders of the world. I won’t achieve all of those goals by the time I’m forty. It seems prudent to have a few ideas of what I will do with the gift of time I am granted beyond this milestone birthday.

Julie R. Enszer is a writer and poet who lives in University Park, MD. You can read more of her work, including her blog, at www.JulieREnszer.com.

This is column #14 dated October 30, 2007 in the series, CIVILesbianIZATION.

Word Count: 703

OUTSIDE OF THE NATION

Nowhere in the world are we – gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people – a majority. There is no gay homeland from which we came and to which we turn in times of danger, for support and validation. Wherever we live, we are a minority. Even in Provincetown, the East or West Village, the Castro, Halstead, or West Hollywood, we are a minority, unless we draw the lines very narrowly and resist coloring outside them. The fact is we queer people will always be in the minority, living across cultures and communicating with others like us and yet not.

Living as a minority sometimes has advantages. Alienation from the dominant culture can be a creative; it can be an inspiring experience that energizes us to build our own culture – outside of the dominant, majority culture. Living outside also gives us greater freedom to think critically and critique our culture. We have the freedom and flexibility to create our own communities and families based not on biological or geographical conditions, but on our own intellectual, social, political, and affectional affinities.

Living as a minority also has disadvantages. Sometimes, we don’t have the support and compassion of our family of origin. Our families of origin may want us to be heterosexual or they want for us their vision of a normal life. Even when the do support us, sometimes they feel sad by their own sense of loss of their vision of us as heterosexual. Sometimes, our parents don’t teach us how to live as queer people and sometimes isolated from other queers, we struggle to find acceptance and validation. Sometimes living as a minority is isolating and alienating. Sometimes the chafe of living between the majority culture and our queer – and minority – subculture is difficult and painful.

Rather than living automatically with people who understand our lives and our cultures, we must seek out others like us. Instead of following the norms of our society, we must build our own lives, sometimes in the absence of effective role models. Then, when we do build families and communities that flourish, we cannot simply rest. We have a responsibility to translate and educate others – the dominant majority – about our lives and our culture, and we have a responsibility to help other queers like us. This can be tiresome and burdensome as well as annoying and vexing. Yet, we do it because we must. We live as a minority within our nation.

Sometimes given the nation’s exclusion of queers, I want to reject my nationality. It is not only queerness. Recently, I’ve felt ashamed of my nations treatment of poor people, of children without health care, and of people in New Orleans during and after the hurricane. I want to rejected my nationality given the reality of the oppressive racism and sexism that dominates our history and our present. I’ve wondered, if my identity as a lesbian is not recognized, why should I adopt the identity that the nation wants for me? Why should I be nationalistic or patriotic?

I am outside of the nation and, yet, I am of the nation. I cannot disentangled the two. We queer people life outside this nation; we are not fully recognized by the nation with all of the rights and responsibility of citizens of the United States. The pain is felt most obviously when our governments – federal, state, and local – refuse to acknowledge our lives and treat us equally.

We are also inside the nation. Many of us were born here. We live here. We must engage with the country – to transform it to include our realities. Ultimately, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people effect everyone in our nation. We are a minority that is mutable – people join us and leave us over time. We can live without a nation; we cannot live outside of nationality. So we must struggle with both—our country and our identities. Through that struggle, we hope to transform us all with more justice and more integrity.



Julie R. Enszer is a writer and poet who lives in University Park, MD. You can read more of her work, including her blog, at www.JulieREnszer.com.

This is column #13 dated October 16, 2007 in the series, CIVILesbianIZATION.

Word Count: 664

EQUAL RIGHTS FOR GAY AND LESBIAN COUPLES IN MARYLAND – DELAYED OR DENIED?

On Tuesday, September 18, I woke up early, showered, and packed my bag for a day of travel. My partnered dropped me off at the New Carrollton train station, and I headed to New York for meetings for work. She drove back to Riverdale for her dentist appointment and then was off to work in Baltimore. It was a typical day.

I responded to all of my email on the train, took the subway to the office in New York, sat in meetings, ate the bagged lunch I had carried with me. Mid-morning an email arrived from Equality Maryland announcing the news that the Maryland Court of Appeals issued their decision in the Conaway v. Deane case—and it wasn’t in our favor.

The court ruled that gay and lesbian couples were not unfairly excluded from the marriage in Maryland or in their words, “the State’s legitimate interests in fostering procreation and encouraging the traditional family structure in which children are born” means that the State can excluded gay and lesbian couples from marriage. I didn’t have time that day to think about it.

My partner and I (and I confess, I often call her my wife and she reciprocates even though there is no legal basis for such an assertion) have been together for eleven years, yet with the exception of the mortgage that binds us both to payment and a stack of documents that are somewhere in our office (I’d be hard pressed to put my hands on them in under five minutes), we are strangers in the eyes of our government. We were hoping, perhaps foolishly that that would change. On Tuesday, we learned that it didn’t. At least for now.

At 7 p.m. Tuesday night, I was tuckered out from my day and still had to meet a friend on the Upper West Side. We had agreed to purchase her used car as she prepares to move to London (where gay and lesbian relationships are recognized), and I was driving it home. It was exciting to get the new-to-us car, but as I exited the Lincoln Tunnel, I knew I had to go south, but I fantasized about going north.

New Jersey recently ruled that gay and lesbian couples would be recognized through civil unions. I wondered, driving along the turnpike if perhaps we should move there. I knew if we headed farther north, a metaphoric and literal migration in the United States as people seek rights and equal treatment under the law, we would be recognized. The entirety of New England is now a safe haven for gay and lesbian couples. Marriage in Massachusetts; civil unions in Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Only one mid-Atlantic government would recognize our relationship: the District of Columbia, and four western states: Hawaii, California, Oregon and Washington. The south and the Midwest, from where we originally hale, are like Maryland all blind to our relationship.

I kept driving south and even felt sad leaving New Jersey, knowing that I was leaving one of the safe zones for gay and lesbian couples. Still, I was glad to get home just after midnight.

We love our life in Maryland. Our home, our community, our jobs. The reality is though, as we grow older when concerns about relationship recognition in light of health care, disability, and death become uppermost on our mind, we may have to move. If we had children, we would definitely want to be in a state that recognized our relationship. And as more and more states recognize gay and lesbian relationships in a variety of ways, my wife and I will want to live in a state – and a country – where we are accorded equal rights under the law.

If Maryland isn’t a state that will do that, we’ll take the future calls about employment elsewhere seriously. The drive north on I-95 is pleasant and will be even more so if it leads to a state of equality for us as a lesbian couple.



Julie R. Enszer is a writer and poet who lives in University Park, MD. You can read more of her work, including her blog, at www.JulieREnszer.com.

This is column #12 dated October 2, 2007 in the series, CIVILesbianIZATION.

Word Count: 667

CELEBRATE, DON'T STIGMATIZE, PUBLIC SEX

Public sex has a long and proud tradition and I, for one, am pleased to see that one of our Senators is engaging in it. Instead of decrying Senator Craig’s actions or speculating about his sexuality or “alleged homosexuality,” I think the more rational response is to affirm and celebrate public sex. The truth is people – all kinds of people including senators – engage public sex as a part of their sexual expression and fulfillment at different times in their lives. There’s nothing wrong with public sex; in fact, it can be a positive and healthy component of adult sexuality.

Public sex, which I’d like to define as sex between two people in a public space that offers a modicum of privacy while simultaneously carrying with it the danger of discovery, is a sexual practice of all human beings. In and of itself, public sex is neither harmful nor an anathema to civil society. When heterosexual people have or think about or fetishize public sex, we giggle and culturally reify it. Think about sex on airplanes. Erica Jong made her career writing about Fear of Flying. Most recently sex in an airline restroom was featured in the film Snakes on a Plane. More than one film about heterosexual people includes a conversation about the “kinkiest” or “most daring” place that the characters have had sex. Often the responses are descriptions of public sex. Watching these films, heterosexual people may be titillated or exchange knowing glances. Public sex is a part of human sexuality and people – straight and queer – are having it.

Yet, when public sex is heterosexual we do not call for surveillance and criminalization. Snakes on a Plane did not result in federal regulations for cameras in airline restrooms. Heterosexual teenagers caught in public parks in flagrante delicto are sent home with stern warnings or, at worst, curfew violations. The wiff of two men having sex in a public restroom, however, causes public outrage and calls for monitoring, police stings and arrests. It’s both homophobia and sexphobia.

Parents will counter that they don’t want their children in the course of using public restrooms to encounter people having sex, particularly two men having sex. I can understand that, I don’t want to unintentionally encounter two men or two women or a man and a woman having sex when I just want to urinate, but I have and it wasn’t traumatic. The fact of the matter is, while people want the possibility of getting caught while having sex, they don’t want to get caught. So when I walk into the rest room or a child does, most people have the capacity to pause for the few minutes it takes me to relieve myself, wash my hands, and move on with my life. Besides if we were to extend the argument about fear of children encountering two people having sex, wouldn’t we mandate that parents must not have sex if their children are in the house? After all, children are more likely to have their first glimpse of adult human sexuality running into their parents bedroom to tell them that visitors are here or they need breakfast or had a bad dream than running into a public bathroom to take a pee.

We need to speak out as a community about the homophobia and sexphobia that surrounds these public sex scandals. If it is truly OK to be gay, then it must be by extension OK for two people of the same-sex to have erotic encounters in semi-public spaces that carry the possibility of being caught—and being caught must not be more likely than it is for heterosexual people and the consequences of being caught must be the same for same-sex public sex partners as for opposite-sex public sex partners.

While we’re speaking out, we could also say that there is nothing particularly wrong with public sex, in fact, for some it’s a perfectly acceptable expression of sexuality. Who knows maybe in the process of speaking honestly about human sexuality we will liberate ourselves and even our heterosexual counterparts.


Julie R. Enszer is a writer and poet who lives in University Park, MD. You can read more of her work, including her blog, at www.JulieREnszer.com.

This is column #11 dated September 18, 2007 in the series, CIVILesbianIZATION.

Word Count: 677

CHANGING THE CIVIL RIGHTS PARADIGM

Sometimes there are moments of great tragedy when gay and lesbian inequality is made visible. These moments are painful and profoundly disturbing. I think of the murder of Matthew Shepherd and the murder of Sargeant Allen Schindler. Two brutal murders motivated by hatred for gay and lesbian people. There is wide-spread agreement in the United States that murdering people because they are gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgender is wrong. It is a public tragedy that diminishes all of us.

By and large, however, gay and lesbian people live peaceable lives. The vast majority of us live without being targeted for discrimination, harassment, or murder. Yet, regularly, we obscure this reality. We perform a victimized status for the American public and for our legislators in an attempt to pass laws. This performance and these laws emanate from a civil rights paradigm that is a close, but not quite fit for the queer community. It’s time for a change.

We in the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community—the queer community— are not going to achieve equal rights through the demonstration of hardship, or victimization, to the American people. Not because that hardship isn’t there; it is. It can be found and performed as we have just seen in the performance for the passage of the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007. We can find and tell individual stories of brutality and harassment for the benefit of Congress and the public. We can even put it together to create a pattern. The reality is, however, that the pattern of violence and abuse of gay and lesbian people in contemporary culture does not rise to the level of the reality that was experience by the African-American community during the 1940s, 50s, and 60s which lead to the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

On one hand we could argue that nothing should ever rise to that level again. We could argue that we should learn from our past and take action earlier to smite injustice and strive for equality. In fact, I think that is the respectful framework that our queer civil rights organizations have adopted, but the time for that has now passed. It is time to reframe the debate.

For us queers to present our experiences in this country within the civil rights paradigm now and in the future is a strategic error. First, our experiences do not rise to the level of intensity or repulsion for most Americans as the experiences of African-Americans did during the 1960s. People recognize this fact; they know it. We must acknowledge it through a change in strategy. Second, a focus on violence and brutal repression has a different impact on the American people today in 2007 than it did in 1967. If we were still sensitive to violence and death, would we be in Iraq?

Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people are not going to achieve rights by asserting victimization. Our story, while compelling to us is an adequate parallel. What we should do instead of seeking to honor the civil rights movement by mimicking it, is to craft new messages. They may emerge from the history of the civil rights movement, but we must transform them to make them our own.

Our messages are not about violence, victimization, and harassment. Our messages are about the ordinary and the everyday. We will achieve equality by demonstrating the ordinariness of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender life. The banality of our lives, the everyday similarities of our lives to our heterosexual counterparts, is the message that people will understand and believe. It is the message or ordinariness and dailiness that will help us secure equality.

We need to turn up the volume and energy on these messages. Certainly, we stand on the shoulders of all who have worked for justice and equality in the past. We must honor their work, but when standing on the shoulders of greatness, we are most able to keep our balance by looking forward or looking upward than by looking downward or backward. To have a vibrant contemporary queer movement, we need to reach to the future, not the past.

Julie R. Enszer is a writer and poet who lives in University Park, MD. You can read more of her work, including her blog, at www.JulieREnszer.com.

This is column #10 dated September 4, 2007 in the series, CIVILesbianIZATION.

Word Count: 694