#This was another speech of Ivan Coyote's

[campgender]

Thank you, Ulrika. My words tonight, my expression of fem power, grows out of the courage of the young fem-butch trans people, lesbian-feminist people, peace and gender activists both Palestinian and Israeli, with whom I spoke in Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem two years ago. It is inspired by the courage of Raouda Marcos, the founder of ASWAT, the organization of Palestinian gay women, who fights for the lives of all her people on so many fronts.

In 2008, I found the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet who died at age sixty-seven on August 9, 2008 in exile and who lived his life labelled as a ‘present-absent alien’ by the Israeli government. I will carry his words on this fem body for the rest of my life. Dear Poet, how did I find you, through the dusty roads of unknown histories, you whose words live on so many tongues? I was so ignorant of the love you poured into your differently metered lines, of your swirling solid notes of exile, of the white mare that runs down into the valleys no longer safe, that drinks from your fathers’ wells, now empty of their sense of self. I came as a stranger, a Jewish fem stranger, into your cadences of loss and exultation, into your Andalusian sunsets and endless stony roads that lead to children carrying fathers on their backs, to endless journeys past familiar olive trees but with no rest allowed, no fruit given.

I stood in front of the grey looming wall that divided life from life, that marked the loss of history for one people and the loss of a soul for another. That impenetrable wall, with its razor wire far above us, froze my fem queer body. And that is why I am here tonight. For many years, I have written, mapped, tracked the power of my fem desire, the strength of my thighs to grip the wanted body and shake it loose of its hard places, to offer my fullness of desire and flesh as a way through, as a break in the wall, as a yearning that refuses solid borders and policed boundaries. I have revelled in the thrust of penetration, the opening in the wall. In other writings, I have charted how desire for a certain kind of touch can push a woman off the map. And on that deserted sandy road in East Jerusalem facing the wall’s solid brutality, I had an inkling of a new fem politic, something beyond my earlier years of celebration of the fem-butch courage that had walked the hate-filled streets of Joseph McCarthy’s America.

How does a fem face history; how does my body, which always speaks of my desires, confront the atrophy of national compassion that so marks our world? A port of entry, a simple thing, a taking in, an opening in the wall. Over ruins so huge they threaten to blot out all hope, your words find me. I have tasted your heat, seen the olive trees in exile, decorative in the gardens of the usurpers. What a strange two the world would think us, a 1950s Jewish fem from the Bronx and the dying Palestinian poet who lives in every Arabic mouth—but the only way I can live in a world where such a wall exists is to take your words into my mouth. A port of entry, a simple thing, a taking in, an opening in the wall.

Joan Nestle’s 2009 speech at the Melbourne launch of the book Femmes of Power: Exploding Queer Femininities by Del LaGrace Volcano and Ulrika Dahl, as published in her foreword to Persistence: All Ways Butch & Femme, ed. Ivan E. Coyote & Zena Sharman (2011)

[riverspatrick]

Gender-Fluid

In preparation for a project, I watched an old Channel 4 documentary called ‘What Happened To The Gender Benders?’ the day before I received Ivan Coyote’s latest book (which I will discuss in another post) and read about Demi Lovato’s new identity and Elliot Page’s six-pack. All the while, I had to fill a form before being considered eligible for the project. I was told if I selected that I identify as male, I wouldn’t get the work. I was pressured to select ‘other’. I slept on it, then decided I had to share the thought.

Non-binary doesn’t sound right to me. It sounds divisive. Us and them, which is a binary concept. Everyone I have known have questioned their gender identity in their own way, even the toughest school bully who loved getting head from me in the woods after school eventually reciprocated (he was teethy as I remember it) as long as I agreed that it didn’t make him gay. We had long conversations after our rather short acts. He was tough and sentimental. Few feel they live up to the social construct that is imposed upon them, and the level of peer pressure varies depending on where you live too. In some places, men are killed for being effeminate. Growing up in my neck-of-the-woods, you rarely saw women wearing skirts and makeup, and many men were scrawny hippies with flowers in their hair. Behind the pronouns and the title itself are questions that have been raised by past generations under different names. Gender-bender, third sex, I prefer gender-fluid to non-binary.

I was born with a penis, male is my sex, but it doesn’t define my gender. Make no mistake, I love my pleasure zone, but having a penis never made me the man my father expected me to be. I’m half a man in his eyes, which by his standard is still better than being a woman. I’ve been called he, it and she (pejoratively) before, neither bother me, I see pronouns as purely practical, not factual. Bureaucracy. Most people call me by my name in my presence and those who are closer call me ‘love’ or other nicknames of their own. I could never be ‘they’ because I reserve the pronoun for them nameless people who rule the world in the shadows, you know, the ‘they-say-this’ people? They say you should eat three meals a day. They say men are like this. They say women are like that. They say I’m pansexual because I fall in love with a person regardless of what they have between their legs. They say I’m gay because I currently love a man. I’m not they. I am singular and depending on the decade, I have been labelled differently. My friend Brenda (né Paul) insists that I am non-binary now. “That’s all the rage these days,” she said after giving me a speech on the myth of the post-op phantom-limb.

What’s wrong with androgyny? I’ve always had long hair, I love a good dollop of eyeliner and I find skirt-like garments – be it an extra long t-shirt with a belt (how eighties of me) or a kurta – refreshing. You’ll find me wondering round the shops in nothing but a custom nightshirt and Crocs. My friend Brenda makes them. Looks like a dhoti but without the cultural appropriation, inspired by that famous picture of Klimt. I don’t want to be defined by what I am not. My name is River, not Not-John or Not-Jane.