For the sake of argument, let's just say that you were getting pretty down on the particular gender dynamic that you've known and loved for years. Let's also say that you were kind of feeling like maybe that particular gender dynamic was, say, falling out of favor 'cause everyone's so motherfucking post-queer, post-gender at this point that we don't even have to have words to describe ourselves. We've come that far, apparently! "Hi, my name is 10xfast and I'm ____", except, I dunno, insert a hand gesture for that gender identification that isn't even necessary or even that acceptable anymore.
Butch-femme, right? In the last few years, I've felt like my gender identity and my Great Femme Search was getting a little nuts and deceptive ... oh, like I'd decided to buy a dog and had accidentally been given a wolverine instead. Everyone I was dating was looking very femme but in identity? Not so much. I was thinking of getting "Why do you have to be such a boy all the time?" printed on t-shirts after the last failed adventure in identity politics.
And, really, I didn't actually fail all the time. Sometimes I'd land The Uber Femme, the femme so femme that any failure in butchness on my part would somehow offend her. Did I cry at a movie? Minus 20 points, don't do that around her friends. Did I forget to open a door? Well, she's standing in front of it like a T-Rex whose shriveled arms and lack of opposable thumbs have made door-opening totally impossible, so OPEN THE DOOR ALREADY.
What to do with that, really? For the most part, I've been really happy with the way that I express masculinity. It's a patchwork; I can tell you where I learned every piece of it. I can also tell you what I've decided to drop, 'cause some things just weren't gonna go into the mix. I can't fix a car, for example. I won't kill your spiders: those motherfuckers are scary and beyond my control.
So what to do? I tend to put a lot of stock in the gender identity of my partners, so the queer girl who looks femme but doesn't identify isn't really my thing anymore. By the same token, the Uber Femme who has a checklist sitting in her very stylish and expensive purse that she'll use to keep track of my butch infractions ... well, that's kind of shitty, emotionally damaging and insanely ego-bruising.
I don't want to say that I was ready to give up. That'd be some trite, romantic comedy silliness right there. I think I was ready to take a break or change my tactics or to start to settle for anyone who fit the appearance bill but wasn't quite up to par on the shared interests front. At the end of the summer, I remember having an issue with The Girl Who Had An Interesting Occupation But Wasn't Actually That Interesting and telling Tres Bien that I wasn't going to chase her. "I'm done chasing," I said. And I totally said it with all of the false confidence of a 16-year-old boy.
Here's where we go into romantic comedy territory. Here is where I write a screenplay.
Enter Punk Rock Femme, Stage Left.
She rolled into my life with tattoos and an attitude and a hundred really cute headshots. She is an Alpha Femme without the demands. She makes me laugh. She loves all of the music that I love and plenty that I don't and whoa, how unusual is that? She steals my hoodies with record label logos. She knows more about the labels behind those logos than I do. She's a pusher of the right boundaries and is soft on all of the ones that I can't give up. She melts stone. She talks shit and backs it up. She does funny things to my shyness. She is so smart that sometimes I just stay quiet and listen. She has a posse. She kicks my ass in pool. She is fierce.
When we are near each other, I feel very much like a better version of me. We smolder, we click. I understand butch-femme again when she puts her arm through mine when we're walking. I get a fluttering in my chest if she uses the wrong pronoun. We match each other in a way that is perfectly gendered without being forced.
And here is where I hope that the rest of the screenplay writes itself.
