A Word of Our Own: Ch 4 A Brief Meditation on Desire
Named—desire is dangerous. Named it grows.
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A Word of Our Own: A Memoir of Bodies, Language, and Home—Meditations on my homo female life. And why it’s so hard to use that word lesbian.
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4. A Brief Meditation on Desire
Until that trip to Texas, all I did was yearn—which is not the same as desire. I was an expert yearner of the mute kind. Not at all like my sisters who were vocal and specific in their desires—for the denim grip of Calvin Kleins, a sloppy kiss from that boy with delicious blonde streaks in his hair, “I can’t wait ’til I can drive, buy a car,” freedom far from my mother with her rage and rules. My yearnings were always desperately vague. Pouring over poetry and scripture, I’d feel this huge pull for something out of reach, unattainable, unspoken, maybe unspeakable, and I’d open my heart, offer up those feelings to God and call it prayer.
I had a chronic disturbed, disturbingly yearning gaze. I stared at female teachers, the minister of music, was drawn to them. Hoped they would save me. They had such caring eyes. Never considered it might be… something else. Though others did. In high school, when I thought I was still going to be a medical missionary, I volunteered at the hospital where a perfect stranger told me, “You look just like that character in that film, Carrie. No. It’s that other one, Jodie Foster in The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane.”
He identified something more threatening than a serious, solitary, yearning girl—a lezzie, a perv. Not long before, a neighbor introduced me to a theater director who wanted to cast me as a daughter who obsessively apes her dad. But the idea of being seen as so obviously unnatural made me queasy, and I said the rehearsals conflicted with all my activities at church. Which they did. And gave it a pass.
Everybody knew what I was except me. Lezzie, lezzie, lesbian.
Which is why I yearned, but never desired. Why I would eat whole packages of pudding mix, then try to throw it up. Why I would jog for miles. Desire demands both will and knowing. Acknowledgement. It would have killed me. The shame. My mother would have tossed me out. I’d’ve ended in the streets. A teenager like the ones we see with homemade tats and mangy dogs. Or worse, in one of those re-education places with prayer circles and electro-shocks to burn that elemental part of you—desire— to ash.
I should beware now that I’ve named it.
Named—desire is dangerous. Named it grows. Matures, asserts itself, wanders the house at will, tries to eat its fill. It speaks. Desire speaks its needs. I want. I want. I have. I had. Desire can still surprise. Overcome. Is entitled. In that, desire seems practically... masculine. When it comes to sex, anyway. And power. What are women allowed to want but new make-up, clothes, bairns? We can have whole ridiculous closets full of shoes, but not ask for a raise. A tarnished vote for president. Even after I came out I rarely allowed myself to stand at a bar, or anywhere, really, in my best jeans and newly gelled hair and look, and feel this thing, this... desire, allow it to be there wholly naked in my eyes, unapologetic, and fearless... To act, to speak. Take. Allow my objectification. Assert yours, with intent to caress and smell and evoke shuddering sounds. No. Absolutely not. I remember… Oh God, I remember the earth-toned dorm room I shared with a roommate at school. What panic, what horror when I heard her key in the lock, how desperately I pulled up the sheet to hide Kay’s head between my naked thighs.
Once I had a girlfriend who cried with huge wracking humiliated sobs every time she let herself come. She looked just like Annie Lenox. That singer. Until she began to cry.
What courage it still takes to claim it, feel it, say it. Lesbian. That word which begins with a female’s desire for like (my god the joy of your breasts in my mouth, the feel of your warm pussy curling itself around my hand), but shifts beyond it into the world where it is a slur as common as dirt on the tongue of every man rejected in a bar, every man passed over for a promotion given to that fucking lez, that ball-breaker, that dyke. On the lips of every woman afraid of her own cunt, terrified of mine. Of naked female ambition. Dyke is the name of every woman who desires.
In the midst of this, who can know what lesbian lust even looks like? What words are there for it, our brains polluted with heterosexual fantasies, hetero resentment, and rage and fear? Our desire is a second language. The clit a medical afterthought. Just the failure of penis to develop, men imagine, or did, or do, a competitor that should be carved out, cut off at the roots. Even now, there are medical text books which don’t mention it at all. I was already 32 years old in 1998 when Helen O’Connell became the first in our modern age to map the clit’s rich, expansive life of nerves and blood vessels and tissue, discovering that it dwarfs the small and clumsy penis that nevertheless is everywhere.
Even dykes imagine having them sometimes. Keep a few in their nightstands in a rainbow of shades that you can boil for hygienic purposes. The femme performance artist Holly Hughes once joked in an interview, “I have a dick and I know what to do with it.” So what if she’s a man fucking a woman when she’s in bed?
Even now, I’ve tamped desire down so far I haven’t found the roots of it yet. It’s misplaced, like a molar that grows sideways in your mouth, like an embryo lodged in my uterine tubes, a twin there behind my heart that has constricted it with a bit and bride’s bridle. Don’t worry I won’t speak. Am so sedate, I barely jaywalk, run across at yellow to catch the light. Litter. Or speak an unkind word to the people who’d block the sidewalk waiting for Sunday brunch at the nearby restaurant where we couldn’t afford to eat. I scarcely dare lift my eyes to other women in public and look, much less with naked desire.
I won’t tell the students this. I’ll look calm and collected, professional, authoritative, comfortably out. Fear is there nevertheless. It has made itself at home. Threads through me like my hidden clit. Like the bands of gold that Japanese potters sometimes use to replace the missing shards of shattered pots. There is beauty to brokenness. Danger, too. To ourselves and others. What is rage so often, but thwarted desire? To love to hate to fuck to love to be.
Stay tuned for…
Ch 5. Diving Into the Wreck
To read previous chapters, check out A Word of Our Own: A Memoir of Bodies, Language, and Home.
xoxo K