By Ren Jender
In high school the only legal place to listen to decent music was art class.“I like David Bowie”, my friend Shirley opined to the teacher, Mr. Baldacci.
He laughed and said, “I don’t think he likes you back.” Straight guys, even the arty ones pretended they didn’t understand why all the girls loved David Bowie.
Our Moms would notice in his posters and album covers the glittery slinky clothes and pale thin arms that aped a female fashion model’s. Mom would say, “He hardly looks like a man at all.” Mom’s type of man had a body and face like a side of beef. If she was still married that guy was part of the furniture stewing silently in front of the T.V. with a beer in his hand.
The boys in school were no better. In fifth or sixth grade some of them had been our friends. Their newfound pseudo-masculine veneer was a seventh or eighth-grade vintage at best. But already us girls had had our fill of boys shouting abuse from cars in parking lots. Our Moms would say, “That means they like you.”
David Bowie, skinny, skinny pretty, pretty was the type of boy other boys yelled shit at, the type of boy who would tell us years later that when he was a teenager he made a choice. “I thought if these guys were going to torment me anyway, I’d reeeeee-eee-ally give them a reason.” So he dressed more outrageously, acted more fey and used that persona as a form of judo against the world.
The boys in my school never had a clue: they were getting their asses kicked every time David Bowie was on the radio. In one verse his voice so low, it broke and in the next verse so high he could’ve been Diana Ross. Girls couldn’t resist singing along.
Of course David Bowie liked us. He was us. Shirley explained to Mr. Baldacci, “He’s bi.”David Bowie would later deny he was bisexual, put out some wildly successful, crappy music and acquire an ex-model wife with breast implants and a baby, but I prefer to remember him as the guy from the seventies who fucked Mick Jagger.
Flipping through teen magazines I see the David Bowie I loved
on every other page. His slender, hairless body reborn as Orlando Bloom’s. His ivory-girl complexion mapped onto the faces of the young male cast members of The O.C. Straight guys still say, “I don’t get it.”
In a drag-king contest I despaired over the taste in music—and men—Jon Bon Jovi?! Fifty Cent?! Who wanted to be these guys when she could be a queen for a day? All those girls in the lesbian clubs with precisely cut, bleached-blonde hair wearing fashions and shoes out of GQ by way of Mars, the illegitimate daughters of David Bowie: hear my plea.
Bind your breasts. Wear a feather boa. Make sure to put on a functional dick. Because I don’t know if you’ll win or lose, but I can guarantee: you will get laid.
Showing posts with label Ren Jender. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ren Jender. Show all posts
Monday, January 11, 2016
Sunday, July 24, 2011
No Wife in Sight
By Ren Jender
“He talks about the wife a lot,” my girlfriend said of the straight guy who shares her office.
“Like ‘the car’, ‘the house’, ‘the dog’,” I offered.
“Yeah,” she said. “Women don’t do that.”
If she had been talking about straight women she would have been right. They rarely refer to “the husband.” They say, “my husband,” the same way they say “my mother, my father, my aunt, my uncle.” But in liberal Massachusetts, “the wife” endures – even in queer psyches. Barely a year after queer marriage became legal I read a post on a queer women’s mailing list that began, “Over the weekend the wife and I went to this great new bar…”
Whether it has a definite article in front of it or not, “wife” is one of those names whose proximity can poison the words around it. Any banker, plumber, or garbage collector can hold his or her head high if he or she is called “accomplished”, “top-tier”, or “first-class”, but put any of those descriptions next to “wife” and a tang of sarcasm leaks into them.
“Wife” has a taint equaled only by the “Miss America” title. If the next Miss America had a pierced clit and bright blue and green fire-breathing dragon tattoo stretching from her shoulder, across her back, and ending on the front of her upper thigh, not only would she not be considered cool, but huge ornate tattoos and clit piercings would, in an instant, become as stale and outdated as a grandmother’s dentures and “Evening in Paris” perfume. Most grandmothers are wives too.
The coolest dyke couple I know, after being together for years married soon after the law changed. I had to ask one of them, “Do your refer to each other as ‘wife’?”
She narrowed her eyes and shook her head. “We prefer partner. ‘Wife’ is kind of a loaded term.”
A corporate lawyer friend who also writes poetry is of the generation that tends to smile and give clueless straight people a pass. But when her writers’ group was looking for new members she made her one preference clear, “No more doctor’s wives,” she said.
When I first started to frequent lesbian bars I avoided the seventies-style feminists perched on their stools not just because of their bad haircuts and outfits but because I couldn’t get past their self-righteous disdain for lipstick, razors, and sex toys: the best things in life. When queer marriage became legal I really missed these women. Whatever faults they had they wouldn’t be, like so many engaged dyke couples interviewed in the media, gushing, with all the depth and incisiveness of a bridal magazine, about how wonderful becoming a wife would be. Friends of friends well into their thirties who had been through ever other permutation of relationship among the Boston dyke dating pool, got engaged after they’d known each other two months – just like we used to make fun of straight people for doing.
Still, when I was invited to this wedding, my first legal same-sex wedding I not only accepted, but promised, “If I find the right dress, I’ll wear it.” Before Gillian Anderson’s sensible pant suits in The X Files, and Hillary Clinton’s Senatorial campaign wardrobe I was the woman who wore girl clothes and makeup but never donned dresses or skirts no matter what the occasion. A decade ago I wrote a poem about making one exception to the no dresses policy: if I won an Academy Award – I’d have to know beforehand I was going to win, though: being nominated wouldn’t be enough. Since I hadn’t written a screenplay and had no immediate plans to do so, I thought I was safe. To one of my cousin’s weddings I wore a satin blouse cut from a vintage wedding dress and tails with my dress pants – and still got disapproving looks from my mother.
For this wedding I tried on a lot of terrible dresses – decorated with two many bows and baubles, laughably overpriced and ranging from a too tight size 10 to a billowing size 6. I settled on this all-silk crimson secondhand number that cost $18. It fit like a glove, but I can’t get into it without assistance – a problem that doesn’t arise with pants that fit. The dress also necessitated my cutting back on dessert consumption for a month beforehand so that pulling up the last inch of the zipper wouldn’t regress from being a challenge to an impossibility. Like most dresses it doesn’t have pockets, so I had to buy the first – and last – purse of my adult life.
Why go to all that trouble for a celebration that will create not one but two wives? Maybe because one time sifting through the sweaty crowd at a 90 degree Pride I saw Eve and J. L. give each other a spontaneous kiss that didn’t seem perfunctory – or like a last ditch effort to keep either party from committing murder. Maybe because even though queer marriage became legal in Massachusetts over a year ago – for which there was a big midnight celebration at Cambridge City Hall – I couldn’t find a marriage card that featured a couple different from the one-woman-and-one-man ethos even in my two favorite, funky stores near Harvard Square. Maybe those of us who have been the confidante for women of all sexual orientations hope for more to change instead of just a switch from saying, “That’s terrible what he said to you” to “That’s terrible what she said to you.” My advice is, no matter what your legal status is don’t let anyone be the designated wife. Have a marriage with no wife in sight, you’re off to a good start.
“He talks about the wife a lot,” my girlfriend said of the straight guy who shares her office.
“Like ‘the car’, ‘the house’, ‘the dog’,” I offered.
“Yeah,” she said. “Women don’t do that.”
If she had been talking about straight women she would have been right. They rarely refer to “the husband.” They say, “my husband,” the same way they say “my mother, my father, my aunt, my uncle.” But in liberal Massachusetts, “the wife” endures – even in queer psyches. Barely a year after queer marriage became legal I read a post on a queer women’s mailing list that began, “Over the weekend the wife and I went to this great new bar…”
Whether it has a definite article in front of it or not, “wife” is one of those names whose proximity can poison the words around it. Any banker, plumber, or garbage collector can hold his or her head high if he or she is called “accomplished”, “top-tier”, or “first-class”, but put any of those descriptions next to “wife” and a tang of sarcasm leaks into them.
“Wife” has a taint equaled only by the “Miss America” title. If the next Miss America had a pierced clit and bright blue and green fire-breathing dragon tattoo stretching from her shoulder, across her back, and ending on the front of her upper thigh, not only would she not be considered cool, but huge ornate tattoos and clit piercings would, in an instant, become as stale and outdated as a grandmother’s dentures and “Evening in Paris” perfume. Most grandmothers are wives too.
The coolest dyke couple I know, after being together for years married soon after the law changed. I had to ask one of them, “Do your refer to each other as ‘wife’?”
She narrowed her eyes and shook her head. “We prefer partner. ‘Wife’ is kind of a loaded term.”
A corporate lawyer friend who also writes poetry is of the generation that tends to smile and give clueless straight people a pass. But when her writers’ group was looking for new members she made her one preference clear, “No more doctor’s wives,” she said.
When I first started to frequent lesbian bars I avoided the seventies-style feminists perched on their stools not just because of their bad haircuts and outfits but because I couldn’t get past their self-righteous disdain for lipstick, razors, and sex toys: the best things in life. When queer marriage became legal I really missed these women. Whatever faults they had they wouldn’t be, like so many engaged dyke couples interviewed in the media, gushing, with all the depth and incisiveness of a bridal magazine, about how wonderful becoming a wife would be. Friends of friends well into their thirties who had been through ever other permutation of relationship among the Boston dyke dating pool, got engaged after they’d known each other two months – just like we used to make fun of straight people for doing.
Still, when I was invited to this wedding, my first legal same-sex wedding I not only accepted, but promised, “If I find the right dress, I’ll wear it.” Before Gillian Anderson’s sensible pant suits in The X Files, and Hillary Clinton’s Senatorial campaign wardrobe I was the woman who wore girl clothes and makeup but never donned dresses or skirts no matter what the occasion. A decade ago I wrote a poem about making one exception to the no dresses policy: if I won an Academy Award – I’d have to know beforehand I was going to win, though: being nominated wouldn’t be enough. Since I hadn’t written a screenplay and had no immediate plans to do so, I thought I was safe. To one of my cousin’s weddings I wore a satin blouse cut from a vintage wedding dress and tails with my dress pants – and still got disapproving looks from my mother.
For this wedding I tried on a lot of terrible dresses – decorated with two many bows and baubles, laughably overpriced and ranging from a too tight size 10 to a billowing size 6. I settled on this all-silk crimson secondhand number that cost $18. It fit like a glove, but I can’t get into it without assistance – a problem that doesn’t arise with pants that fit. The dress also necessitated my cutting back on dessert consumption for a month beforehand so that pulling up the last inch of the zipper wouldn’t regress from being a challenge to an impossibility. Like most dresses it doesn’t have pockets, so I had to buy the first – and last – purse of my adult life.
Why go to all that trouble for a celebration that will create not one but two wives? Maybe because one time sifting through the sweaty crowd at a 90 degree Pride I saw Eve and J. L. give each other a spontaneous kiss that didn’t seem perfunctory – or like a last ditch effort to keep either party from committing murder. Maybe because even though queer marriage became legal in Massachusetts over a year ago – for which there was a big midnight celebration at Cambridge City Hall – I couldn’t find a marriage card that featured a couple different from the one-woman-and-one-man ethos even in my two favorite, funky stores near Harvard Square. Maybe those of us who have been the confidante for women of all sexual orientations hope for more to change instead of just a switch from saying, “That’s terrible what he said to you” to “That’s terrible what she said to you.” My advice is, no matter what your legal status is don’t let anyone be the designated wife. Have a marriage with no wife in sight, you’re off to a good start.
Saturday, May 8, 2010
The Past Shops at Trader Joe's
By Ren Jender
She was wearing a t-shirt in a shade of light blue that no one wears anymore except for the cashiers at Trader Joe’s--and they only wear that color because they have no say in the matter. We were in Trader Joe’s, so the shirt wasn’t remarkable. Nothing about her was. Still, I recognized her, the woman whose name is a flower, from the back, at a glance. We had dated, for a brief time, eight years before.
There must have been something special about her: why else would she have spent a four-month stint temping as the most important person in my life? I remembered that shortly after they first met my mother had said of--oh, let’s call her Violette---“She’s the cutest little thing,” which had unnerved me. I never expect my mother with her teased hair, orange lipstick and 1950s mindset, to say anything nice about my girlfriends especially not the butch ones. Mum usually waits until after a terrible breakup, when I most need her to be on my side, to say good things about anyone I’ve dated.
Ex-girlfriends aren’t good for much else, but they can be effective teaching tools. Violette taught me I didn’t want a normal life. I might have come to this realization snarking at Violette’s straight roommate who had even fewer social skills than most science nerds. She stayed in watching TV every night, her hand tight around the remote. So whenever we were at Violette’s place, we ended up watching the same shit she did: science fiction and Jessica Alba in an unholy alliance. But even when Violette and I were alone I wanted to surreptitiously unplug the set, jab at the buttons and say “Oh look, it’s broken.”
Maybe I came to the realization when Violette and I were driving to Provincetown. For the last half-hour, instead of keeping the conversation going, as I had, like a cocaine-addled cruise director, for most of the previous four months, I relished the silence underneath the soft, dreampoppy sobs of Mazzy Starr and tried to convince myself that people who knew each other well didn’t need to talk.
I was the one who wore the lipstick, so I got to do all of the cooking. Because I was “good at” cooking, as if I were born knowing how to make hummus starting with the dried chickpeas and ending with a swirl of extra virgin olive oil flecked with good paprika or how to stew lemon slices and figs into a fruit compote that makes oatmeal palatable. Like every other skill, cooking is a matter of practice. I tell people--I must have told Violette, “You burn enough stuff, you learn.”
That Violette was food-shopping made me think she might have settled down with someone, either a femme who wrote the list and would chop, sauté and serve-- or another soft butch, maybe a fellow scientist. I imagined the two of them living like bachelors, heating up frozen enchiladas and rice that came already cooked.
One night I had been stirring a pot in Violette’s kitchen while crap TV blared in the next room and I thought, “I want to go home.”
My apartment then was small and ugly, but it was mine, quiet, with no one but the cat expecting a meal from me. I left Violette's place. As I walked into the fresh cool night air, I ignored her voice calling, “Come back,” from the open window. I could never figure out if she wanted me or the fruit compote I had tucked under my arm.
She was wearing a t-shirt in a shade of light blue that no one wears anymore except for the cashiers at Trader Joe’s--and they only wear that color because they have no say in the matter. We were in Trader Joe’s, so the shirt wasn’t remarkable. Nothing about her was. Still, I recognized her, the woman whose name is a flower, from the back, at a glance. We had dated, for a brief time, eight years before.
There must have been something special about her: why else would she have spent a four-month stint temping as the most important person in my life? I remembered that shortly after they first met my mother had said of--oh, let’s call her Violette---“She’s the cutest little thing,” which had unnerved me. I never expect my mother with her teased hair, orange lipstick and 1950s mindset, to say anything nice about my girlfriends especially not the butch ones. Mum usually waits until after a terrible breakup, when I most need her to be on my side, to say good things about anyone I’ve dated.
Ex-girlfriends aren’t good for much else, but they can be effective teaching tools. Violette taught me I didn’t want a normal life. I might have come to this realization snarking at Violette’s straight roommate who had even fewer social skills than most science nerds. She stayed in watching TV every night, her hand tight around the remote. So whenever we were at Violette’s place, we ended up watching the same shit she did: science fiction and Jessica Alba in an unholy alliance. But even when Violette and I were alone I wanted to surreptitiously unplug the set, jab at the buttons and say “Oh look, it’s broken.”
Maybe I came to the realization when Violette and I were driving to Provincetown. For the last half-hour, instead of keeping the conversation going, as I had, like a cocaine-addled cruise director, for most of the previous four months, I relished the silence underneath the soft, dreampoppy sobs of Mazzy Starr and tried to convince myself that people who knew each other well didn’t need to talk.
I was the one who wore the lipstick, so I got to do all of the cooking. Because I was “good at” cooking, as if I were born knowing how to make hummus starting with the dried chickpeas and ending with a swirl of extra virgin olive oil flecked with good paprika or how to stew lemon slices and figs into a fruit compote that makes oatmeal palatable. Like every other skill, cooking is a matter of practice. I tell people--I must have told Violette, “You burn enough stuff, you learn.”
That Violette was food-shopping made me think she might have settled down with someone, either a femme who wrote the list and would chop, sauté and serve-- or another soft butch, maybe a fellow scientist. I imagined the two of them living like bachelors, heating up frozen enchiladas and rice that came already cooked.
One night I had been stirring a pot in Violette’s kitchen while crap TV blared in the next room and I thought, “I want to go home.”
My apartment then was small and ugly, but it was mine, quiet, with no one but the cat expecting a meal from me. I left Violette's place. As I walked into the fresh cool night air, I ignored her voice calling, “Come back,” from the open window. I could never figure out if she wanted me or the fruit compote I had tucked under my arm.
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