This is the kind of thing that I would normally post as a Twitter thread, but I’m also anticipating my own exit from Twitter in the not-too-distant future and would like to find a way to make that happen gracefully, so there you go.
I went to a small, local drag show last night with a couple friends and was speculating about whether anyone would recognize me. There was at least one performer there who I’d worked with before, though last time we interacted my hair was much shorter and I was wearing much more makeup. We had a great time, and it reminded me of how much I love the collective effervescence of burlesque and drag performance, which is something I wasn’t sure I’d ever experience again.
Nobody recognized me from my burlesque days, but I was at the bar after the show when someone standing behind me yelled, “My gender is bees!” I turned around, they looked me in the eye and said it again. I smiled like, yeah, that’s me, which must have been adequate because they gave me a hug. They were referencing this:
We chatted a bit about what we’ve been up to the past few years; they knew from the Mercury Cafe, where I used to be one of the poetry slam organizers, which I haven’t been back to recently due to the fact that I work graveyard shift, plus pandemic. I mentioned my book, and they wrote down the title.
The dedication page in One Hand to Hold, One Hand to Carve says “for Bennett.” It’s referring to Bennett Nieberg, one of my co-authors on the bees poem who died last year, not peacefully.
Bennett did the most amazing, experimental writing on Borderline Personality Disorder that I’ve ever read. We didn’t always see eye to eye, but they were always a welcome presence in my life. They not only encouraged my growth as a writer, but helped shape my understanding of identity and self-awareness and what it can take to feel at home in your body, or even just to imagine feeling at home in your body. If you haven’t read One Hand to Hold, One Hand to Carve yet, trust me that you’ll see how that’s relevant. But that’s not the sole reason for the dedication; it’s also because, though Bennett’s life was far shorter than it deserved to be, I wanted to communicate how important our time together was, and that what I learned from them as a mentor is something I’ll carry my entire life. Even if we’d only met once and never worked together, I believe what they shared would have been enough. We should all be so lucky.
It was around 2018, when I was first getting settled in Colorado, that I decided I wanted to put burlesque and drag on the back-burner and focus on my writing. I feel pretty good about that decision, and if I’m ever unsure then something like this always seems to come along and remind me. Being recognized for my poetry, while at a drag show, makes that pretty clear. But this incident also made it clear to me that the two paths aren’t as divergent as I might have thought.
A lot of folks in the writing community nowadays talk about writing “queer joy” as if it’s a separate category, like joy is this compartmentalized thing in the queer psyche, like writing about it is incompatible with writing about queer trauma, or failure, or unpleasantness in general. Sometimes this kinda makes me feel like I’m doing something wrong, because joy has never been able to exist in a vacuum for me, and my work reflects that.
“Poem About Bees” was the closest I ever got, I think. It made a lot of folks in the audience laugh, but it also made some pretty severely uncomfortable, which I like to think was ultimately good for them. My own journey into joy involved a lot of trauma and a lot of heartbreak. I’d like it if I could have just been who I was without all that, but that’s not the world I live in. I live in a world where I could have chosen to stick with what was comfortable (even though it didn’t make me happy) and live with that comfortable numbness until I died, probably wondering what the point of it all had been. I chose that trauma, and I’m glad I did. It’s how I ended up at that drag show, getting a hug from someone who found their joy in the end result of all that work.
It’s hard to reconcile that idea, though, when I’m standing next to the conspicuous absence of someone who didn’t make it to that point. That’s a reminder to me that trauma doesn’t always lead into joy, and that you have to move toward that joy with the knowledge that you may not get there. Making the journey, committing to be true to yourself, that has to be enough. You have to want more, you have to know that you deserve more, and there will inevitably come a point where knowing and wanting that has to be enough to fill the reservoir. That point may come sooner or later, it may be the beginning or the end, but none of us can have joy if none of us are willing to face our pain.
Anyway my book is out now and I’m told it’s terribly cathartic in such regards, so go read. And track down some of Bennett’s work, please. They edited a journal called What Are Birds and published a fair amount, and it’s all worth your time, I promise.