Queer Lovin on V-Day
Love, Worth, and Futurity
On the occasion of my seventh Valentine’s Day with my partner I feel compelled to think about the ways in which I have come to recognize, enact, and enable love. And how perhaps the journey to true and sincere self-love is one of self-acceptance. In some ways I can and have fallen out of love with myself. And how I’ve come back. Or at least how I yearn to return. I’m working through some concepts here, on how being in love, being witness to familial love, being queer in-love can serve as a conduit for self-worth and wholistic self-love.
My first Valentine’s Day in-love, my lover and I spent the day walking the frigid streets of Gotham, shopping. That morning, we unwrapped gifts of pink sneakers and love notes – with a plan for more indulgences after tangling and untangling ourselves from soft sheets made damp from our sweat, from our moaning. It was a time in the early part of our love affair that was ripe with confidence of a future. A life together. We still joke today that we could’ve gotten married in those first three months of our courtship, and maybe we should have. But we didn’t on the advice on all those around us – all concerned about the potential for heartbreak and the drama enacted by State bureaucracy. So, we shrunk our dreams and engagement plans for small rings of rose and white gold and got matching septum piercings. We posted vaguely about one another with photos under grainy Instagram filters of the mid 2010s, and frolicked along, the wet of our noses hardening on to our new jewelry, making tears where there was once none. I had found love, and with it hope. There was a fight in me though, one that felt the call to resist the familiarity in my partner, to never consent to the trust she offered me through her countless actions. From what I came to misunderstand about love, loving, being queer in love – is that it would be short-term, that there was a bottom and just when I was about to get comfortable, it would fall out. And I would be left alone with my despair.
The love between mother and child is deeply familiar to me, as experienced and as witnessed from my mother to me. From her to my sister. My aunt to her daughter. And from my grandma to my mother and to us three, her granddaughters. All reciprocated as we learned it is our duty as daughters to love our mother-providers back. I know the love of sisterhood – first felt in my friendships, then one fought for between my sibling and I - for each other. Later as I got grown, we designed sisterhood together, between my sister, my cousin and me. I witnessed breaks and reconciliations between my mother and her only sister. I witnessed the complication of love between a mother and daughter; grief met with silences. And I learned the importance of trust and how loyalty can be flexible between my mother and her closest girlfriends. My aunties. I am learning more, daily about how I’ve come to witness, what I’ve been taught and what has abundantly flowed in the midst of the precarity of our Black femme lives, Love.
My small, very femme family is mostly queer. Us who have lovers who are living closer on the margins than we do, outnumber the others who have managed to maintain the love that pushes them closer to a margin...or perhaps towards the cliff of the kinds of love I’ve come to understand between a Wife and her Man. The love lives of my queer family were hush-hush, but this was not unlike the love lives of the so-called straight women. Eros. All of it was a mystery. Only some of us were discouraged from performing. I am the youngest of a family that has spanned several generations and iterations of revolution. Being a Black Lesbian had varying threats in New York City that transformed from the 1970s of my aunt, to the 1990s of my cousin, to the time I came into my identity in the 2000s. What I knew early on with the first stirrings of my attractions was that I wanted a life unlike what I had been force-fed from TV families. It was something like that of my aunt and her rotating cast of butch women and what I imagined my cousin’s to be in her far-way life with her wife. Nothing was concrete – nothing felt accessible. What I did not know was how this longing would put me more at odds with what I believe I deserved. What I imagined could be possible.
In my early years, I discovered many ways that loving me in public would evoke feelings of shame. I always felt desirable. There was no container for the youthful empowerment I felt in the passion of that very corporeal reality. I would not be like the other dark-skinned fat girls in the projects – relegated to the staircases only. Though I’ve had my share. Sneaking around would be on my terms. I knew from the composition of my soft and athletic body, the richness of my unblemished skin, to the texture of my hair – that few would actually even see me. So, I stopped considering those who were blind. I often query myself now when observing people out in the world or looking at images – who my mind sees first, second, and who I have to make myself see – and wonder when my imagination became so distorted by the internal machinations of colorism. Being kept in the shadows is not in alignment with the nature of my personality. The desires of boys my age and the interests of perverted men lacked the excitement I longed for as a teenaged girl. The passive nature that was expected of my assigned gender, could not rival my desires. Even in that resistance and enactment of resilience I swallowed the pain of unprocessed rejection. I rendered the male gaze moot, learning I could find myself considered in other ways. That if I spoke, and if I presented in such a way I could not be ignored. Hair, nails: did. Outfit: unignorable. New considerations emerged as I matured.
Those first few queer trysts left me enthralled. And still my dark skin, and my chubby body kept me distanced from the promise of the light skinned modelesque community of socially mobile lesbians who seemed to have all the clout at the pier. In the club. On the scene. Many of these memories have left me deeply troubled. I’m thinking of my entanglements with women twice my age who had no qualms about my teenaged existence. I am still detangling the trauma from the mundane, but for most of my life I thought of my own existence as controversial. This is not untrue. Black. Queer. Femme. Loud. Political. Stylish. Quick-witted. I had to lie about being bisexual to everyone. Straight here. Lesbian there. Not so much now, thank goodness for Queer. But to live believing that my life is measured by its proximity to or distance from a normal forced me to internalize my homophobia. Believing my life to be taboo, or as the unenlightened often liken my existence to a Lifestyle – has forced me to call into question the legitimacy of how I love. When the excitement of my first love affairs morphed into violence, or disintegrated into apathy, I realized I wasn’t the only experiencing and embodying this dissonance. Some of my exes found themselves recreating heteronormativity in their queer lives as they grew up and others embodied it, partnering with cismen (while seeking queer love and community clandestinely).
My internalized homophobia became my bondage. In the ways I would have hoped to turn outward, perhaps towards my family, I went within, trying to locate and assign meaning to my queer being. It was safer there, and I could be my full self. There wasn’t enough there though. It did, however, become a gesture that became more meaningful as I lived through experiences. In the ways I believed the male gaze no longer informed how I felt desirable, it was that gaze which determined who I found attractive, or worthy of my affections and attention. At one point in life, I sought out the desire of a straightish light skinned woman whose intention was to work through her sexual frustrations by working her way through a queer friend group, leaving me and my then (high-yella masc-presenting) girlfriend for last. In the wake of her burgeoning queer desirability, I knew she was fraud. This was in many ways the cliché of the queer girl falling for the allure of the so-called straight woman, but my compulsory attractions left me indisposed of common sense. Or self-preservation.
So much heartbreak. So much harm enacted on myself and others. Where I did find freedom in my emerging queer gender expression and love; I felt in part a character. Black queer feminist praxis wasn’t the axis of my libido then. Maybe not even so much now. The script, not unlike what we see in the mainstream handling of queer love and desire – composed by outsider-observers. Becoming a high-femme, femme-AG, often felt like finding a place on a spectrum I didn’t create. All for love. For being loved. And in part trying to know myself, in order to love myself. These identities brought me closer to community but created expectations beyond my imagination. Beyond having prideful representations of queer existence and love life, I didn’t understand the metrics of worth. Worth that is often assigned to the very things that make me invisible (or hyper-visible) in a world that seems hell-bent of destroying me or at bare minimum keeping me captive. Who was I if I was no longer in relationship with the kind of love that was considered normal?
I added fresh water to a crystal coupe, lit a rose-scented candle, burned a fragrant incense this morning on the altar for the ancestors who protect, inspire, and guide me. These women, from three distinct generations, made their own families, all had trouble with their husbands, and all loved women and girls fiercely, two even romantically (but covertly). I cried to Ethel, Rose, and Jannette. They felt the weight of the shame of being fully embodied in a world that calls into question dark skinned Black Femme existence – and they are working to elevate me from that heaviness of (what feels like a ceaseless) emotion. The second candle, black wick flickering wildly on my desk, is of Josephine Baker, a queer woman who for me embodied fearlessness in the midst of a life of heartbreak and disillusionment. These women have in their ways forged paths for me to acquaint myself with love, with worth, with understanding myself outside of the paradigms of the world we’ve inherited – and to think of a future that has a place for me and mine. These ancestors are proof of love, and a future life inside of me. Perhaps Queer Black Love is futurity.
Even in my queerness, I found (and still find) it hard to believe I am worthy of love. After deliberately being in queer community for more than a decade, and being in love, in partnership, and lots of trouble with my partner for most of that time, I still worry about who I am in love. I have doubts about the sincerity of my love – wondering if its portrayal is there to offset the conditioning of a heteroromantic upbringing. Or perhaps, invalidating my experiences of love because I fear they mirror what I’ve come to believe are the acceptable displays of love. It’s crazy to believe that all the evidence of the security my partnership has offered can leave me suspicious as opposed to comforted. Unlike those who I thought I loved in the past, my partner has never cheated, never lied to me, has been willing to both endure and initiate difficult conversations – for the sake of love. She has opened her life to me, ravishing me with gifts of comfort, kindness, generosity, and protection. Our families have united, we have compromised on so much, in fact she has compromised more, for love. And still, I worry – that our outlaw love might not be enough – that I might get lost in the whirlwind of the performance of our union. Moreso, I fear she might just quit loving me, that she might see what so many have been conditioned to believe as deficient – and the bounty of our romance will leave me alone, and bitter. In the past, I’ve tried to end things, suspecting it would be better to be in control of our demise, rather than meeting its fate. - It’s been hard distinguishing the usefulness of my “gut” when it’s been informed by trauma. I do not ask more of her, anymore, cannot and should not. This kind of restoration must be enacted from within, and with that the promise of reclamation.
I am learning that it's important to trust the radical nature of my life, while questioning my choices. I’ve come to learn that I have privileges of the body that can ease me into these ruminations – and that at times my questioning of this love is harmful, or rather my enacting of the questioning of love stirs doubt in my partnership. Sometimes, I look to my queer-peers, who I suspect are forging paths too. What I do know is that it’s my responsibility, as a person in-love to determine my worth, to be clear and as confident about it, as I was about the path of my love life. My worth is in no way tied to how I look, where I come from, who I am associated with, what I do, where I’ve been or where I dream of being. My worth just is. Just as my queerness just is.
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💜💜💜💜 I’m feeling and thinking a great deal. Truly Grateful!
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