Love Letter To An Amazon: Celebration Of Butches, Mascs, Studs & MOC Lesbians & Queers

Hi, everybody. Hi, Ruth. Yeah, this is an amazing experience. I can see you. It's amazing. Thank you, everybody connected with this festival. This is such a beautiful experience, and I wanted to read a couple of pieces to celebrate different aspects of all of us here, kind of as love poems for all of us. This first piece is about gender. I love lesbian and queer gender, all the different ways that we express and experience it. And if I could, I would write a love piece to every person here, but this is a love letter to one particular person and her story. So it's called Love Letter to an Amazon. You've had Coke cans and eggs thrown at you just for walking down the street. You've had women attack you with handbags for using a public bathroom. Once someone called a cop. You were still in a stall with your pants down when he started hitting the flimsy wall with his nightstick, yelling, get out! Your fingers trembled as you pushed your driver's license under the door, trying to prove that you were in the right. Get out! Place. You had gone through the door assigned to your gender. Your gender. What the hell is that? You have girls' parts but wore boys' clothes as soon as you could. You played all their games better, ran faster, jumped harder, climbed higher, collected more swords. You would have given anything to join the Cub Scouts. But they wouldn't let you. You found an old Cub Scout's uniform at Goodwill and wore it alone every day after school. Your parents let you wear what you wanted, but your grandmother said they were making a mistake, said no one would ever love you this way. In 2nd grade, the kids teased you so hard you went mute. The teacher told your mother, Your daughter doesn't talk. Your mother almost fell on the floor. My daughter doesn't talk? At home they couldn't shut you up. Going to the beach was hell because of girls' bathing suits. For a long time your mother let you wear just the bottom half, not the top. Then the neighbors came together to police her. Elaine, you can't be doing this. Your mother played the culture card. Women go topless at the beach all the time in Europe. But Elaine, we're not in Europe. This is Virginia. When you were 4 years old and friends with a 4-year-old little boy, your family said, how adorable, maybe they'll grow up and get married. You knew in that moment you would never get married because you'd never want to be with a boy. You'd want a girl. But 10 years later, when a girl tried to seduce you, you were so clueless that it took her 6 months. The world had told you no one would want you, so when she said she wanted to sleep with you, you fell asleep on her bed. When she said she wanted a back rub, you carefully rubbed her back and nowhere else. When she said she wanted to take your relationship to the next level, you thought she meant going from afternoon naps to a sleepover. Desperate, she finally had to stick her hand between your legs before you got it. It felt better than anything else in the world. After that, you said, I never wanted to do anything else. The funny thing is, she was the one who made it happen, even though you were the one who looked like a lesbian. If short hair and boys' clothes make someone look like a lesbian, a point which I would like to debate, preferably while lying on top of you in a low-cut dress, my long hair falling over my face and yours. Now no one's going to tell you what you can't do or have in this world. You wear men's pants and men's t-shirts, men's shoes and a southern country gentleman cap, and underneath, women's cotton panties and an underwire bra holding high your big, beautiful breasts. My pronouns are she/her, you say in that deep voice. My gender is Amazon. And when you walk down the street in Scala, you wear just that bra and a pair of men's shorts. And when you swim to the rock, you lift the bra over your head so your breasts are free in the Aegean Sea, exactly where they belong. Holding me close, you say, I don't take any of this happiness for granted. It was never my birthright to get to have this as a lesbian. When I climb on top of you, tectonic plates shift inside both of us. When you lean back and I move my tongue against your lips like I'm fucking you that way, both of us come home. When I'm walking down the street alone, I unfortunately sometimes pass for straight, and I need to plaster my clothes with rainbow stickers so I can be seen. But when I'm with you, baby, you're my rainbow sticker. And then this is a poem to—