Inversions

Had a vivid and soggy evening last night. Soggy literally – my umbrella was lost in a melee over chairs as dykes of all types scrambled to cram the Gladstone to the rafters for the Ivan Coyote/Alison Bechdel “not a reading series” reading, and I wound up stalking home fiercely in the rain, thoughts swirling, my vintage lambswool and fur jacket clammy, hair soaked. My head was so full (can I make this blog play “Mind like a playgroup” as soundtrack?) that I was quite distracted from enjoying my dear friend D who was walking with me from Parkdale down Queen; I’m sure she was relieved to climb on the streetcar and leave me behind.

The reading was stellar. Ivan is the consummate storyteller, so genderqueer flirty and funny and moving. Her stage presence is bigger than Alison’s – her medium is oral telling, and in the Q&A after she quite nonplussed Alison with some arch banter about Alison’s long, buffed fingers with the carefully trimmed nails. Alison was so touching, the narrative around the images about her father coming to life as she read slowly, giving us time to savour the graphics huge on screen behind her.

One of the… well, episodes, for lack of a better word, in that memoir (still the best thing I’ve read this year – Fun Home – buy it! is the section about lilacs and lust, inspired by her father’s affinity for Proust. She counterpoints her father’s closeted gayness to her own emergent butch self, her own coming out, with a play on “invert,” the clinical term for queerness contemporary with Proust. It’s so painstaking, so painful, all of this weaving of never-uttered but so visible narrative across their lives in that obsessively restored, obsessively ornamented home in the small town in Pennsylvania.

It was pure joy to see both of these amazing truth-makers in person… I’ve loved Bechdel since I came out, fell in love with Ivan the first time I heard “I like to wear dresses” on Bill Richardson’s show on CBC a few years ago, the story about her queer child friend Francis in Yukon, whose growing up and into the world she continues to chronicle. And I also felt a fair amount of inversion myself… so at home in these stories, but simultaneously in the edge of them.

The crowd was huge and pulsing, and I think this was part of my dislocation. A lot of people with different history for me, from good friends (S&L, who identify so tightly with Ivan’s experiences, I think), to a woman I went on one date with who then started ignoring my emails, to a few other people it was just nice to run into. But one unsettling conversation as well.

I ran into a guy who was half of a couple that was “the” stalwart couple of the poly world, someone my ex used to hang out with. He and his wife seemed to make a marriage that tolerated what seemed to me to be almost unbearable levels of poly activity, unbearably raw pushing at what just about anyone would inscribe as comfort levels. They would have deep “in love” relationships with other people, cc-ing each other on their emails with the others; I once saw the female half of this couple making out with the woman I knew her husband was head over heels in love with. This just seemed… unbearable to me. I always thought they had terrible, loose, guardrail-gaping-over-the-edge-of-the-cliff boundaries… frayed edges that made me feel deeply uneasy just to be around them… but I would shrug a bit – “clearly this works for them, wouldn’t work for me, it’s frantic and overheated and too much, but maybe they are proof that this is possible.” And of course, they’ve split up, badly, a messy breakup leaving an infant and a preschooler in its wake.

My conversation with this guy shook me, made me uneasy, made me think hard about how to make intimacy where the “right kind” of honesty prevails, where the frame of “telling” isn’t everything, but really listening and responding to what’s happening, what’s truly happening, knowing and choosing the stories that could be written in one split second bifurcation moment.

I guess this comes back to the neglected dissertation proposal, the question of how we make each other in intimacy, how we choose what we are making for the other person. I watched Ivan and Alison, the truth tellers who do it so well, who make rich meaning and humour and raw emotion all woven together, elevating meaning. I think about how F and I have grappled with some of the what if questions – what are we writing now with these choices that could make the patterns for later if we’re not careful? I think about the bifurcation for myself in that crowded room in the Gladstone last night, where I’ve Cajun danced (badly) to Swamparella with my ex, been to karaoke parties, seen my sister dance in her burlesque troupe, surrounded last night by dykes and my history, pondering on my tongue possibilities that could look so different, so far away from the city that has really made me. Choices. Truth. Stories. Enacting the “real” parts of ourselves in different contexts, like Ivan’s narrative about becoming the nice young man on the plane who loved to hear the 89 year old widow’s story. The part of her that is true and real, despite the widow’s friend’s eagerness to tell her friend that she was mistaken about Ivan’s gender, that she’d entrusted herself to something she was wrong about. Who she was in that moment. Where we choose to be who we can be.