Salon de Femme--aut delectare aut prodesse est

[Bit]

Ahh, Arwen, you do ask difficult questions... I thought I couldn't answer this one. Seriously, the only thing I could think of was "lil bit" and that's just patently ridiculous... so I mentioned it to Gryph and Nick. And then a comment Gryph made about Gloria Gaynor's song, "I am Who I Am" made me recognize that I actually DO have something like you're asking about, but it isn't about how to be Femme, exactly.... and it isn't about Gloria Gaynor, either.

Tis Albert, in the Broadway version of La Cage Aux Folles... to that point of the musical, Albert has been nothing but a caricature, "aging queen shallowly seeking after troublesome drama-laden attention."

Then his partner asks him to leave the house while the potential in-laws visit.... and Albert is suddenly revealed as a complex, deep character, vulnerable and deeply hurt, and we realize that the caricature is merely the face he shows to the world to protect his inner being. His defiant, aching, deep understanding of this world and his place in it, of what it takes to claim a place in it, of what it costs to compromise his place in it, is revealed in this one long moment of song--and although he resumes his caricature afterward and maintains it for the rest of the show, WE are changed and can never see him so shallowly again.

THAT version of "I Am Who I Am" has informed my life as a Femme, whether I was living with partners who believed that my being Femme cast them into highly resented "roles" as Butches or whether they believed my being Femme "contaminated" them with too much femininity. That version and the vision of Albert singing it--along with "A Little More Mascara"--sustained me through the long hard years when I was caged myself, living a lie in my mother's folly, desperately aware of my place in the world and what the compromise was costing me.

You could say that the songs are about being queer, not Femme. You could say that they sustained me as a queer being, not specifically as a Femme. You might be right---but me, I cannot separate out "queer" from "Femme" in myself. For me, to be one is to be the other, inescapably so; and that, I think, is the point of the music also, that for Albert, to be queer was to be a performing queen. He could not separate out the two, either.

In some way, those two concepts are the same. The caricature of queerness he presented to everyone may have been the shield and armor that protected his inmost deep and complex being, but it was also his gift to the world, his wryly humorous presentation of a core queer femininity.... and what is lil bit, if not my own wryly humorous version of a core queer femininity?

I am who I am, a queer Femme being coping with an often hostile world, and from Albert I have learned to celebrate every part of that as often as possible and to cling, stubbornly and without apology, to what is truly authentic no matter how I might decide to present it--and no matter how anyone else, even a partner, might receive it.