A Word of Our Own: Ch 17 Hating Hillary Clinton
I could smell defeat, but if I confessed to my friends that I woke up panicked every night and couldn’t sleep, people would literally pat me on the head. “Honey, there’s no way Trump can win."
Welcome to A Word of Our Own: A Memoir of Bodies, Language, and Home—Meditations on my homo female life (in-progress since 2017, the book, not my life).
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Ch 16: …I remember that when my mother got frustrated with me she’d threaten to drag me to a shrink. Like my aunt who was a colorful woman, loud, had unapologetic opinions on things, was made fun of. And got locked up from time to time in mental hospitals where I think she got electroshocked. In the end it was the preacher, not the shrink, for me. I tried to explain that the problem was her, my mom, the “troubled” one. She was the one ranting and raving. She was the one, who after fighting with my incorrigible sister, threatened to run her car into a wall, desperate to escape. But he didn’t believe me. No one did. He just raised his hands to the God of Abraham and Isaac and prayed.
17. Hating Hillary Clinton
On most days, what do I pray for but peace? And its cousin silence. Not mine. Yours. Which is maybe solitude. Even now, decades later, I seek it out. The empty track around the soccer field in the middle of a busy city, the Bois de Vincennes with its wooded paths and hidden beehives, the muddy, winding streams that when you listen speak in the still, small voice of God. Often when I write, I try to scape away the noise and discover what it has to say. Sometimes I run from it, go online where there are nothing but shouting crowds. Terrifying silence demands I lay myself bare, to prove I exist as myself and not another. And the things I think, the ideas I have, which have been shaped by this life in this body in this world are, if I offer them as precisely as possible, as invaluably human as yours.
That year, in 2008, staring at the leaves which fluttered from Nathalie Barney’s garden in the Bois Visconti, walking around with a newly scalding consciousness of my body, I wrote about hate. About nutcrackers and cunts, marveling at how that word woman colloquially meant female, meant this body, meant me. How, wearing it, I was interchangeable with all the others in my class. Gay, straight, young, old, butch, femme. Clinton could be my cousin, my sister, my crazy aunt, the mother I never spoke to with her angry mouth and flabby thighs. She could be me.
I wondered, too, why the queer activists in New York who slammed Clinton for being insufficiently radical, didn’t seem to care that while Hillary’s opponent Obama was a groundbreaking candidate when it came to race, he campaigned with the same anti-gay preachers as George W. Bush, and his bros hated my female guts, and what could be more conservative than that? My situation quickly became awkward. I was still writing for Gay City News and they endorsed Obama. After that, I wrote more and more reluctantly, painfully aware that I was sending my op-eds to a gay male editor who, even though he usually supported my writing, never had to consider, not really, what it meant to have lived a female life. And when (just) once, he replied with an email asking me to reconsider the thrust of one of my Obama-critical, womany piece, I lost my shit. I was always happy to oblige if he wanted me to explain, reinforce, prove. But to change my opinion because it grated? Or was inconvenient? Fuck. The bottom fell out of my brain. Should I quit? Would I be fired?
I paced in our tiny apartment, stared down into the courtyard at my neighbor who always let her tiny dog shit between the potted plants. Asked, what would Nathalie Barney do or Audre Lorde? Olympe de Gouges? Thought, too, about what would happen if I left. Gay City News didn’t publish many pieces for or about dykes. Hell, even his other dyke writers, even I, didn’t write about lesbians enough. I finally told Paul I wasn’t changing a thing. To his credit he published whatever it was. I don’t even remember the piece now, just that after our exchange I’d feel a little afraid every time I wrote and hit send, though he kept publishing me. Even submitting my work to the New York Press Association for prizes. Which I often won. But so what?
Clinton lost the presidential primary—of course. And Obama won. Later, while the whole nation celebrated how we’d elected our first black president, and pundits even declared us post-racial, The New York Times only raised it as a question: Was there sexism in the media's coverage? And concluded—not that much. Perhaps they’d re-defined sexism, and it no longer meant discrimination against women. Or maybe they just didn’t look.
The whole pathetic pageantry of woman-hating was replayed in the New York City mayoral primary between Bill de Blasio and out lesbian Christine Quinn in 2013 when the howling crowd online hacked away at her voice and her body, every one of her seeming moral failings examined, and denounced, most viciously by LGBT people, while the mediocre, inexperienced Bill de Blasio… Well, Bill de Blasio had the laissez-passer of his manhood, and a temporarily, long-ago bisexual wife who unleashed the anti-dyke dogwhistles claiming Quinn wasn’t fit to run the city because she didn’t have kids and couldn’t possibly understand mothers or (real) women.
By the time Clinton ran for president again in 2016 I didn’t even follow the news. I’d scroll right past the articles, even if she’d gotten amazing approval ratings as Obama’s Secretary of State. Unsurprised when her numbers sank when she declared—because she declared—her presidential ambition, I already knew what was going to happen. The Berniebros launching their attacks. The usual lefty queers I followed on Facebook smugly saying they’d love to vote for a woman, but not this one. If only that super-smart, far more lefty Elizabeth Warren were running (Ha! When she finally ran, they still preferred the old guy). The mainstream media sneered. Never took her seriously. Even when she won the primary and was up against the incompetent, impossible, pussy-grabbing, build-a-wall anti-immigrant Trump, they only focused on her minuscule failures. “Oh my goodness, her emails.” Or dragged her irrelevant husband into the fray.
I could smell defeat, but if I confessed to my friends that I woke up panicked every night and couldn’t sleep, people would literally pat me on the head. “Honey, there’s no way Trump can win. You can’t really believe that.” But I’d seen what had happened to Ségolène in France, what happened to Clinton in 2008. And like some idiot Cassandra I just kept telling people, “Don’t underestimate misogyny.” “Don’t underestimate hate.”
We were in New York on November 8, and Ana persuaded me to stand for hours in the sun to get into the convention center which was Clinton’s temporary headquarters on election day. I was glad I went. The line was full of young women and little girls of all races in the most terrible pantsuits. All smiling and laughing. Somebody had wheat-pasted signs, Pussy Grabs Back! They were so sure their time had come. Inside, we found a spot on metal bleachers next to an older black woman who told us that she’d been waiting all her life to see a woman president. As the returns started coming in, I watched sixty years of hope drain from her grey face to be replaced by fear. Outside in the street, there were grim crowds looking through the windows of appliance stores to watch the results on bargain TVs.
Later on, most of the post-election analysis would focus on racism among Trump supporters, not misogyny, even though researchers showed that hate focused on women, on females, was as good a predictor as political party for who’d pull the lever for Trump. Which is no surprise if you were paying attention. In fact, white supremacy is almost always paired with male supremacy. It’s a lynchpin of it, a silent partner.
In the LGBT community, we talk about racism at length, but on that we’re mum, probably because we ourselves sideline women, ridicule them, hate them, hold them to different standards just like the rest of the world. I remember feeling punched in the gut when I realized the most scathing anti-Clinton op-eds in the gay press were written by lesbians, not attacking her politics, but, like the men, sneering at her screechy female voice, her repulsive female flesh— as if it weren’t like ours even if we stuck it into jeans and tee shirts instead of pantsuits.
And when it came to misogyny, even the Avengers didn’t always put a name to it, not really. When we couldn’t get a group like GLAAD (the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) to follow the press coverage of Avenger actions, I think we used the word lesbophobia to characterize it, which wasn’t quite true, because the problem wasn’t so much our homo-ness, GLAAD was a gay group after all, but our femaleness. As usual, everything women did was insignificant, all of our complaints trivial. Which is why ten or twenty thousand dykes could be marching in the New York streets, but neglecting to mention it in the press was still no big deal for the media watchdog GLAAD.
Mostly though, dykes like me ignored sexism in the community like we did in our personal lives. Most of the dykes I knew had close fag friends from ACT-UP. Every year, guys would dress up as Church Ladies and serenade the Dyke March. We’d laugh and applaud like they’d done something amazing. Still, that hate was there from the bottom to the top. In 2013 maybe, I went to a speech by Urvashi Vaid at CUNY, called, What Can Brown Do For You? and she said it out loud, how she faced both racism, and misogyny, telling us that when she was appointed head of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in 1989, a prominent donor called the Task Force offices and said to a development director there, that he could not believe they’d hired that “radical woman” who was “practically a nigger.” A response par for the course for many male, white donors.
Not long after that I was hanging out with two lesbians in Massachusetts. They had an old clapboard house, and we were lounging on their big front porch, when the subject of misogyny and fags came up, and one started painfully talking about how, more than once over the years, a gay man she knew would casually grab her breasts, or her ass, and wouldn’t understand why she got upset. “It’s not sexual after all,” they’d say. And, “Aren’t we friends?” “I just wanted to see how they felt. They’re so squishy.”
Her wife admitted it had happened to her, too. She had to knee a fag in the nuts because he wouldn’t stop groping her. “Fucking bitch. Cunt. Can’t you take a joke?”
I don’t think they’d ever talked about it before. Who would they have told? Who would have believed them or cared?
When Kim Davis, an obscure county clerk in Kentucky, refused to give lesbian and gay couples their marriage licenses in August of 2015, gay men online made her the butt of a thousand jokes about hillbillies and incest, rednecks and Possum Bottom Kentucky Honeymoon Lodge and Bait shop. With Trumpian zeal declaring, “God bless the whores who love multiple penises up their worn out holes…” and “cock-hungry crevices.” And their posts went viral with likes and with happy-faced emojis.
I used to know the fag editor of a giant queer site. We met up for drinks a couple times. I liked him. Then I started to notice how on his Facebook page he always smarmily warned his friends, “No! There will be no bigotry here,” but he didn’t say anything when they regularly called women bitches or cunts, or sneered at Madonna’s aging vagina when she released a new song. Probably he didn’t even notice. Like he didn’t notice that whole #MeToo movement was about focusing on women’s experience, and took the opportunity to write a piece about getting assaulted himself. And on my Facebook page, once, when there was a discussion about lesbians and trans issues, he chimed in to lecture all us dykes about how transphobic we were to exclude penises from the list of our desires if the penis-haver identified as a lesbian.
I knew we were invisible, but that? I should have shut him down but didn’t. I fled my own Facebook page, I admit it, while some of my dyke friends did battle with him. I was silenced by a mix of disbelief and shame, maybe even fear, at the incredible authority of his pronouncement. My god, how certain he was, this Voice of the Queer Community intoning that we homo females had no right to say no, or to say yes, no right to defend our own sexual desires. I was stunned, too, at how easy it was to shut me up even if I’d been an Avenger, wrote a whole fucking book about them, about social change, even if I gave speeches, had a pretty good analysis of misogyny, a pretty good one of homophobia, but was nevertheless defenseless when the two converged.
Filling the silence around me was disgust and hate, the inkling that a whole “progressive” generation which indulged in hating Hillary Clinton, hating Christine Quinn, hating Hillary again reinforced our habit of hating women. And that this deeply rooted, carefully nurtured hate was shaping the broader LGBT community’s attitudes towards dykes, shaping our own self-loathing until we dismiss lesbians before they (we) even open our ugly mouths. And why not? You only have to look at our pathetic female bodies to recognize the corruption inside.
Sooner or later I’d have to speak, take a stand.
Stay tuned for…
Ch 18…
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xoxo K