OK, Cupid?
2014
Last week, i got myself onto an on-line dating site.
Bizarre, but was free, & I was bored, it's the middle of winter...why not?
i click through agreements and the questions unravel like pixellated pathways with very narrow choices.
Describe yourself: Liberal or Conservative?
i refuse to check liberal.
Gay straight or bi?
Really?
i retreat to reconsider: I am a Revolutionary and a Radical Dyke.
i don't fit in your uptight corporate capitalist rigid bougeois bullshit boxes—
but, the box spreads her legs a bit—"Tell us about your gay coming out story."
Oh. Well. Hmmm...how ‘bout i tell you my Revolutionary-Dyke-Separatist-Coming-Out-Story?
once upon a time i lived with a tribe of wild womyn. we lived on a slice of mud between a primeval oak forest and a zooming 8 lane motorway in an ancient green country under a rainy gray sky up against the fences of our fears to protest the warriors of patriarchy.
try telling that to a hermetically sealed and buzzing box on ok cupid.
try dating that, won't you? won't you?
well you won't because i can't tell that story to this screen in his digital sterile code: zero one zero one zero—that’s all you got? fuck off!—i'm trying to tell a story here! where the hell was i?
O.K. my first womyn's land was Greenham Common, where we lived wild mythic lives as a multi headed hydra of purest, embodied, passionate resistance to patriarchy, staked out indefinitely and illegally against 8 rows of steel barbed fences that guarded 100 first strike nuclear missiles planted in the center of a really big amerikan air force base.
with this body on the front lines, merging with other bodies of my sisters to warm us all in the rain, i confronted the monstrosity of militarism. it was an occupation that was my only occupation for 3 years. nuclear missiles are the most obvious manifestation of deranged masculinity, and our womyn's encirclement of that base lasted an entirety of 11 years, until that particular military option went away, which it did, but that's another story. Greenham Common Womyn's Peace Camp didn't start out as lesbian, but by the time i arrived, in the summer of 1984, it was brimming over with wild dykes bent of revolution.
ReVoLuTiOn.
now people wear clothes with tags that say revolution, but we said it daily and we knew what it meant in that time in that space.
and many of us there were separatist revolutionaries.
separatist: a terminology that exists for us today as an artifact, found only in museums, in the annals of history...up the ass of history....which seems fitting, fit us up the ass of his-story, where we can run wild and fuck with future outcomes. i digress.
In 1984, no one i knew had language for 'genderqueer' or 'transgender', and i'm tellin you, the most radical thing you could be in this world back then was a lesbian separatist.
we saw power as a real experience in the world, recognized it's multiple manifestations, and we knew power as a dichotomy— lifegivers or deathgivers. well, you know, duality is a real event for us mammals—2 eyes, 2 arms and legs—and for planet earth too— polarity, the possession of gravity, positive and negative pulses, but so easy to blame patriarchal culture for the shitty aspects of duality. i digress, again.
the great centrifuge of patriarchy had split us down the center with a violent axe blow, and i choose to willingly divorce the entire male gender for all time. that's how i saw it; i blamed Him for all time.
honestly, we believed that there were just two genders back in those days, and that it was possible to turn around and walk out of patriarchy. duality, a real kick in the groin sometimes.
separatism— imagine it!
there were 2 sides to that huge fence, which was like an armored beast of separation. we tried to make it beautiful, and we did.
on one side was the forest, filled with gynormous old trees, bluebell woods, ferns up to your head, moist and crumbling with life and fog and birdsong and womyn.
womyn in the fringes dancing and singing and fucking and fighting back, women in black leather, in gowns and veils and dreds and velvet, fighting back against police and soldiers and evictions and arrests. roaring back with spray paint and bolt cutters, instant rice and big english potatoes for gas tanks & tailpipes, fighting back with an endless theft of official documents, serious serial property damage, witchy spells and tree-hugging pagan worship.
on the other side was the base the same forest, but shaved flat and bulldozed docile, paved with 9 runways of fighter jets screaming off and screaming back all day and all night—the base with 3 armies of soldiers marching, following orders, worshipping 100 first strike nuclear missiles, deranged masculinity embodied, and electro-magnetic weaponry flaring like the sun into our soft, target bodies.
Pressed up against all that rigid roaring hot lit weaponry
we were the physical female fringe
outside
outlaws.
out-fucking-rageous.
divisions of that fence taught me more about the conditions of the binary than any crisp university discourse on gender politics ever could. in 1984, in that place, we were womyn digging into the gears of power, stripping them out— inverting who can and who can't and why not. that fortressed base, the weapons, the fence, his-story and all the subtextual violence.
i was a dyke and a separatist on my side of the fence, and i stood with the womyn, with the forest and the moon and the rain, and i lay down with the womyn in the rain under the moon in the mud hearing that forest breathing our names and chanting life! life! life!
imagine an occupation that doesn't go home at night. Imagine womyn engaged in continuous war with men for the purpose of peace.
Madness, right?
life in resistance to the pretty pink box of what a girl is—outside rubbing up against weather—muddy, filthy and furious, cold and fierce as dragons, guarding. we went to prison just to get out of the rain for awhile. we cut through those fences each night and used sections of steel links to toast our bread over our fire circles. got evicted every day, got beaten frequently by uniformed goons and kicked awake in our sleep on the ground to arrests, and some of us were assaulted like that, and all of us were assaulted in our hearts, and one of us had her legs broken by the missile convoy, one got run down and two got beaten unconscious in the night with baseball bats, and we got out of jail and we did it again.
in the end, i got very sick and came back to amerikkka to heal. i was done fighting back, fighting against. it was time for me to choose a new tactic for resistance—i turned my back on the state of the patriarchs, turned to focus into the eyes of my sisters in the circle, my back unguarded to rest at last.
turning my back on the system of men altogether, i moved to Lesbian Land.
Lesbian Land, which is not a warzone. lesbian land, which is gentle and beautiful, creative and safe. a place to question all that came before. all our understandings, misunderstandings. all that we stood under. where we freely created a culture with free womyn at the center. womyn in a state that had not existed for 5,000 years, maybe never.
maybe never.
Womyn's Culture—if i say this to the average human today they think, womens culture—changing diapers, cooking, washing period-stains from underwear, waiting for the right man to save you.
(now there are a lot of men and women apologists who resist this idea of rejecting men and male culture. but i say that while some radical males have on occasion baked a tray of brownies to celebrate MayDay, this doesn't change the fundamental structure of life on earth.) now back to lesbian land—
here i was, deep in the motherland, a cunt-tree in my own land, free of domination. still trying to change fundamental structures. still living in another altered state.
Thunderpussy taking the stage.
for 5 more years, i didn't look in a mirror, read a newspaper, or watch t.v.
i didn't see an ad or step on a scale. i was remembering lost things. i re-membered Goddesses. i re-membered holiness. i re-membered the moon, and she remembered that the last time she looked down at me i was broken and bleeding in a jail cell.
i went feral and re-membered from some wild past life how to haul water. how to plant gardens of food and herbs, and how to live with fire, freely. how to circle with stars, to build houses & gardens, a life that was beautiful and gentle on the land. it was the underground, the wonderground, never*never*land—it was a fantasy come true.
the music we made were the songs of our lives, the stories we wrote were about us, the food, the art, the houses we created. life was ritualized, the female was glorified in the archetypes we unearthed—myth, astrology, tarot, and we stepped into those ancestor skins and danced again.
after life on the front lines of war i was released to live the theory. i WAS theory. fuck theory, there was no theory. it changed with our breath. everything brand new and incredibly ancient all at once.
i was earth and air and fire and water and spirit. this separatism was steeped in no separation. can you dig the paradox of that? yeah, it was powerful living on womyn's land. there was a lot of sex and even more drama. i could have stayed there forever, but honestly, i got a little bored.
now i’m no longer a separatist or a warrior, but still and always a revolutionary. here i am creating a damned profile on fucking ok cupid. i'm growing older, i guess, calming down some, still healing. still a little sick from microwave weaponry at the peace camp 25 years ago.
i’ve lost 2 teeth and one hip. I have had and lost many jobs, dogs, lovers.
now, I teach in an institution of patriarchy, where i struggle against the academented domestication of a place where feminist and queer practices are neutered by scholarly norms of respectability.
once i WAS theory. once there was no theory. now, i teach theory...i teach about "desire", about "transgression”, teach the heteronormative vectors of power to students who were never trained to imagine me. who don’t know how to box me up or in, just as a dating website doesn’t know how to box me up, or in. i teach these youth to disagree with their books and with me. judith butler writes that ideals are uninhabitable. i disagree with butler. I have inhabited fully my ideals.
once upon a time, i lived in never-never land, i lived up the ass of history, with a tribe of wild womyn bent of revolution from our oppression, and i did it for the world to continue.
O.K, Cupid?
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