The Month I Became Straight ...

Yesterday I turned to look at myself and realized I was almost completely utterly a straight woman.  In her stereotypical form.  I had two kids that I doted on.  I was a stay-at-home mom.  I had long hair and shaved my legs.  Most of my friends, at least those I talked with daily, were straight, having somehow found decent, kind, loving and liberal husbands.  My grad school experience had been so the opposite, an immersion in a pro-gay world, with my first ever openly gay professor, who was world-famous at that, world famous due to her brilliance.  She invented the term “queer theory” for goddess’s sake.  She was hot.  Most of my friends were gay or actively pro-gay or more progressive politically than I was.  But no more.  We’d found a real home in the Waldorf community, an easy way to self-select for liberal allies.  It was a wonderful relief to be less pro-biotic, less vegan, and less concerned about some progressive or new age cause than a certain percentage of the population there.  It's nice not to be carving out your space every second.

And over the past two years I’d added to my repertoire the kickers,  the internal signifiers of heterosexuality:   I thought more about fashion than I ever had—though I'd never thought about it a lot.  Mostly I thought more about how I dressed, instead of just putting on something comfortable and asexual.  And I began to think too much about weight.  I’d always been thin, or at least fine, I’d always been athletic and hadn’t thought much more about it.  I was happy, satisfied, and didn’t know what all the fuss was about with other girls’ obsessions with weight loss. Then in the two years of trying to get pregnant, of obsession with trying to get pregnant, the books told me weight gain was a good sign.  And with my tendency to eat to relieve stress, I gained weight even before I got pregnant with Dylan.  Then at my pregnant height I was 208 pounds.  And not worried about it.  But after a certain number of pounds lost after she was born I couldn’t take any more off. 

Who knew?  I know that apparently the whole straight white female world knows this, but I didn’t know.  My need for relief from stress through chocolate was high, especially when the kids were little.  It was hard to work out, hard to find the time for myself.  It sounds trite but that’s how it was. 

The weird thing is that I felt thinking about weight was a straight girl issue—for me it really was.  So that I was somehow giving in, or being traitorous, to care about weight.  It was not my conception of dykedom to care about weight.  Especially to care about calories.  I of course had no money or no desire for Jenny Craig or Weight Watchers—that was beneath the athletic carefree me and not something a self-respecting dyke paid attention to.  So when a few months ago I sneaked onto the online site Calorie Counter, and actually found it useful, I felt illicit, and guilty, and … straight.  My athleticism and my dykedom have always and are still related for me.  I am strong, athletic, like having muscles, dykely.  It’s a way of loving myself, my body.  I know there are plenty of Olympic athletes who are straight.  But there is also Martina Navratilova, and Billy Jean King, two of the earliest celebrities to come out when I was young. 

Here I was mired mostly happily in the home, with my 2.3 kids (almost) and my dog (well two) and instead of a white picket fence a dilapidated urban fence with too much glass on the sidewalk.  Definitely culturally straight, and straight if you watched me coming into the playground or into the grocery store.  I had a silver wedding band on instead of gold one, sure.  I had the HRC sticker on my car but so many don’t know what that means.  So my reluctance to act ‘straight’ by losing weight—such a girly girl thing—helped make me stuck feeling bad.  But I realized I had caught myself on the horns of the dichotomy:  If dykedom were defined in opposition to straight girlhood, then the binary oppositions lined up like this:

Gay                    Straight
_____________________
Casual               Dressed up
Athlete              wimpy non-muscular girl
No make up       makeup
No fashion         fashion
Rebellious          conforming
Athlete               sorority girl
Self-defined       societally defined
Self-initiating     defined by others (men or peer competition)


But also, to my detriment, like this:

Gay                    Straight
_______________________________
Fat                      thin
No kids               mom
Works                 stay at home
Doesn’t care       Obsesses about
 about appearance      appearance

Then I went bra shopping.  I don’t know why my mom had failed to give me this experience.  Perhaps it was mercy.  I only know that bras were something I rarely bought, and rarely thought about, pre-kids.  When pregnant my breasts blossomed, and afterwards I nursed for many years, so I knew something about nursing bras.  During and after that my breasts stayed huge (for me).  And while I realized an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with my bras I was too busy to pay attention.  Then Susan had a wedding to go to, and her bootcamp friends decided to help her find a great outfit.  All well and good, but then they went bra shopping, and I went along.  I mean really went bra shopping, we had the name in hand of the best customer attendant at Nordstroms at the Kenwood Mall, and we went in a group, and I was completely out of my element.  I’d gone once before, to a bra fitter at Macy’s when I was pregnant and huge…but that was a focused, desperate experiment and I’d gotten only wire-free bras.

In the end, I went three times before I got one underwire I liked, and spent two months studying the HerRoom site online before buying seven bras from them, all but one of which I returned, an athletic bra without wires.  How much work being heterosexual is!  I did very much like how my breasts looked supported, having never thought about it that much before, since before my breasts were much smaller or I was nursing.  Now I was a double D!  I felt that if each article of clothing was going to be two months worth of full time work, then I’d never really become well dressed.  Susan’s straight friends, on the other hand, her bootcamp buds, spent all day helping her shop for a little black dress—Susan’s first dress in a very long time—three people shopping a bit for themselves but mainly for the fourth, and coming back successful, only to say:  well now it’s time to get a bra, and then shoes, and then accessories.  So much work, I found it ridiculous, even as I loved the finished look.

All of which is to say that binary oppositions are best challenged and messed with, as Derrida tells us.  But that it was hard in such a straight, conservative location to give up even any signs of gayness.  If I’d been in San Francisco or Santa Cruz, where multiple representations of lesbiandom, dykedom, femmedom, queerdom, and bisexuality blossomed, then playing with my self image would not have been so hard.  Here I felt less free, less able to enjoy the pleasures of my own possible images, perhaps like some black people who choose not to dress down because they think that it will (and it often does) make whites perceive them more negatively.  I often felt invisible, and certainly not affirmed in my gayness,much less my gay momdom.  What I would have given to have just one other gay parent at our school.  So I need to complicate my own relations with my self-image, and de-dichotomize,  I suppose.  Working on it.