Queer Voices: Poetry, Prose, and Pride

Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew is the author of Hannah, Delivered, Swinging on the Garden Gate, On the Threshold: Home, Hardwood, and Holiness, and two books on writing: Living Revision: A Writer’s Craft as Spiritual Practice and Writing the Sacred Journey: The Art and Practice of Spiritual Memoir.

Wearing Bifocals

I recently passed that marker of middle age and got bifocals. Actually, they’re progressive lenses, so they draw no distinct line between the prescription for what’s close and what’s distant. For three weeks I felt dizzy. I had trouble climbing stairs. Reading in bed gave me a headache. But then my eyes learned; they transitioned seamlessly and saw the whole.

I find this stunning. We humans have the inherent capacity to move between two seemingly diametrically opposed ways of seeing, near or far, either/or, and make of them both/and. I’d lost this ability, I’d regained it with new glasses, and only now can I appreciate the miracle.

Too bad that the learning curve back to nondualistic seeing is so damn painful.

For instance: the moment I smashed through my presumed heterosexual identity. The year was 1992. I was twenty-two, standing just inside the door of my first apartment, and suddenly the glass box of others’ assumptions, which I’d unknowingly taken on as my own, shattered. I stood there sobbing, gasping for breath. To move anywhere meant stepping on shards.

I wept for all the years I’d misunderstood myself, cramming the breadth of my experience into a small and cramped story. I wept because the name that best described me was associated with many things I was not—promiscuous, wishy-washy, someone who might don a dildo to march in the Pride parade. I wept for the very ugliness and inaccuracy of the word, the initial bi hacking at sex with its unnecessary overemphasis, the ual pointing an accusatory finger. I wept because I knew society, and my parents especially, would not like this new identity.

With the hindsight of twenty-five years, I now know I wept that day in my lonely, sun-streaked apartment because I’d broken out of one box to step into another, admittedly more accurate and free, but still a box.

A friend of mine died recently. Jeanne Audrey Powers was one of the first women ordained in the United Methodist Church. She worked for the General Conference in Manhattan and traveled the globe, hobnobbing with top religious leaders of every stripe. Just before she retired, she came out as lesbian at an international conference, sending waves of dismay—and change—throughout the global church. She kept an apartment in Minneapolis and attended my small neighborhood church, which was how I came to work for a brief spell as her personal secretary.

Working for Jeanne Audrey meant handling mundane tasks like sorting mail, paying bills, and balancing her checkbook. This giant of a woman was paralyzed by a stack of unopened mail. I’ll always remember one evening when I helped her host a women’s gathering at her high-rise apartment. I carried a bag of fruit and vegetables into her kitchen, pulled a built-in cutting board out from under the counter, and began chopping. Jeanne Audrey entered—and nearly fell over. What’s that? she asked of the cutting board. Jeanne Audrey had lived twenty years in her apartment and had never once sliced a carrot there.

Jeanne Audrey, unlike me, thrived on conflict. Once, when she joined a board for a church organization and was asked to submit a photo, she sent an image of herself topless, displaying a gorgeous tattoo descending over her mastectomy scar. I remember her at the Re-Imagining conferences in the mid-nineties, the gatherings at which feminism collided with the mainline church denominations; Jeanne Audrey sniffed out the conservative infiltrators and press reps, brought them coffee, and engaged them in lengthy, honest, and disconcertingly intimate conversations. By the end of the day they were exchanging phone numbers. Jeanne Audrey was formidable in her ability to transform enemies into friends.

In my hand I hold the blue sheet of paper announcing her death and ponder what made this inept woman so effective at building connections across difference. She was a feminist, she was a woman attracted to women, but I suspect the secret to Jeanne Audrey’s reconciliatory powers was that she loved these boxes not for her identity but for their contents. I write this in her honor.

•  •  •

I was unbelievably blessed in my coming out. My parents were warm and open-minded. The church of my childhood preached and lived a loving God. In my early twenties I intuited that my life force would not loosen or move until I turned clear eyes toward my sexual desires, so I found a spiritual director willing to explore sexuality as a gateway into relationship with divinity and joined a small church that proclaimed a deliberate welcome to gays and lesbians. When bisexuality and transgender concerns percolated into the public consciousness in the early nineties, the congregation hosted adult education sessions to explore broadening its welcome. I was in the chapel listening to a panel of bi visitors when I first understood what bisexuality meant. My church taught me.

The one glitch in my coming out was that I had no partner. For many queer people, the gender of a romantic partner finally exposes the deceptions we’ve perpetuated and foists us out of the closet. I had dated a guy for three years in college—that was it. No experiments with girls, no one-night stands, just the bare ache of my body. My attraction to others was alive, diverse, and unexpected. I felt like a fraud because I had no tangible proof.

For me coming out was not about claiming a sexual reality. The word bisexual felt all wrong, limiting identity to sexuality alone when in fact my body, mind, and spirit were all formed of this multifarious love. The name seemed to divide the world into a dichotomy of gender utterly contrary to my own fluid and flexible experience. Only recently did I learn that the bi actually refers to heterosexuality and homosexuality, and glad as I am for this, the prefix still makes me wince. I use it less and less, not because it’s easier to pass now that I’m in a committed relationship—with a woman, mind; I mean pass as lesbian, another word that feels like broken glass—but because it’s so inadequate. My partner, who is eight years younger, uses the term queer, which has grown on me over time; it’s elusive and strange and inclusive of gender-bending as well as sexual attraction. Queer inhabits the outskirts. I like queer’s perch and perspective. If I’m queer, you can’t nail me down. I’m also more hip. If I’m bisexual, you can carbon-date me as coming out in the nineties.

But queer also perpetuates a polarity—straight and queer—that’s inaccurate. Bisexuals can imagine and inhabit both of these worlds. All this packaging limits a self which I’m discovering to be a fathomless source of surprise.

But at first, coming out helped me name an essential quality of my being. I needed the box so I (and others) could see its contents.

Okay, I still need it. Take today: I’m hawking my novel about a home-birth midwife at the Twin Cities Birth and Baby Expo, with booths for the latest cloth diaper designs on my left and a maternity yoga center on my right. An endless stream of glowing pregnant women push strollers past my table. I’m seated at the very hetero heart of our culture, and my queer identity is, once again and against my will, buried. These strangers can easily assume their reality is mine. After all, my readers assume I’m straight, that I’ve given birth, that I’m a midwife. Over and over, I say, "It’s fiction."

I almost wish my booth were topped with a sign saying Bisexual! with an arrow pointing at me. I need the name, the box, maybe even the dildo, to break through others’ quick and flimsy constructions. Out here it’s not enough to hold my contradictions privately, because then they’re ignored or denied or, worse, persecuted. I need to claim bisexual, if not for my own sake, for the sake of complicating our collective stories.

Actually, I encountered two glitches in coming out. I’d planned to tell my parents on a summer visit to New York. I’d bought plane tickets. But just weeks before my flight, we learned that my sister was pregnant, out of wedlock, with a man my parents and I both despised and mistrusted. My mother and father were devastated. They wept, they were furious, they felt their world crumble. When I finally sat them down and announced I was bisexual, my mother’s face blanched and fell, and then she said, Thank God you’re not pregnant.

•  •  •

Unless you’re outrageous and gregarious in your sexual exploits, bisexuality is mostly below the surface—a vibrant, continual embrace of contradictions; an aesthetic; a saturation of the self. While everyone around you (trans friends gratefully excepted) seems satisfied to fit into dualistic structures of gender and sexuality, you find yourself muttering, But—but— Bisexuality is nonduality made flesh. It’s a spiritual gift.

Of course all sexuality is a spiritual gift. It’s just that socially normative sexuality bears socially normative spiritual gifts. And our culture manages to deny even these.

Gifts on the margins, then, are especially invisible. Even to those who embody them. On a recent book tour of two-year colleges in rural Wisconsin, hotbed of conservative Christianity, I was asked several times by various students with shaved hair or pierced eyebrows and voices edgy with hurt, Is it possible to be both queer and spiritual?

Is it possible to be both/and? Listen to your bodies.

For the ten years of writing that novel, I swam in the amniotic fluids of birthland, where women’s bodies demonstrate an animal wisdom we in our most sophisticated, technological institutions can’t begin to comprehend; where our culture fears bodies, especially women’s bodies; where pain is a veil women pass through to meet new life. What does birth—natural birth, traditional birth—reveal about our essential humanity? And when our beginnings are meddled with, by medicine, fear, economics, convenience, how are our spirits affected? For a decade I romped in the subversive world of midwives and loved it—as a novelist. It wasn’t mine, but it became mine. In the limitless liberty of fiction, my external reality—that I was a bisexual woman in a same-sex partnership and with an adopted daughter—mattered not a whit.

Except it did. My questions were an evolution of questions I’d been asking all along. What does it mean to be embodied spirit—in this body, with its unexpected attractions? We are our bodies, and we are not our bodies, and how can this be? What happens at that moment when breath enters flesh and the whole magnificent journey of being spirit incarnate begins? What happens when it ends?

Turns out bisexuality colors everything: my favorite movie stars, my companion in bed, how I’ve pieced together work, the God I worship. Certainly my experience of gender. Certainly my lifelong obsession with that ultimate of paradoxes: We are magnificent, mysterious energy inhabiting, for a short but beloved spell, matter. And the form of that matter is magnificently varied.

Which reminds me of another moment from my coming out story. On the Sunday I had determined to come out at church—during Joys and Concerns, when the community shares its prayers—Jeanne Audrey had just healed from her mastectomy. We both raised our hands for the mic. I shook with nerves about calling myself bisexual in front of God and these people, so I was relieved when the usher handed the mic first to Jeanne Audrey. She stood, affectionately stroked her chest, and thanked God for her new body, which was clearly missing a breast.

Moments before I came out in church, Jeanne Audrey as a form of prayer publicly fondled herself. It was as though the universe had conspired to say to me, See? Your inner contradictions are nothing compared with what’s possible.

I wish in response to those young, searching Wisconsin students I’d mentioned the Native tradition of honoring Two Spirits, those who manifest all genders or are attracted to all genders, as spiritual leaders. Who better than queer folk to navigate the dynamic intersection between matter and energy? By virtue of our bodies, we’re much accustomed to traversing multiple worlds. And in one of the more difficult spiritual realities to comprehend, the further a person is pushed by difference or discrimination to the edges of society, the deeper the well of grace made available to them. If only their hearts are open to it.

As a Christian I mischievously consider Jesus a great Two Spirit, both gentle and fierce, tender to John and sweet on Mary, one foot in our gritty unjust world and the other in a numinous Present. I say this playfully but I’m serious. If you’re looking for a model of nonduality, of embodying and transcending oppositions, it’s hard to find better than Jesus. In Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one.

But here’s the trouble: There’s no better model for dualism (black and-white thinking, good-and-bad judgment, the in-crowd and the out) than the church.

I prefer to hunker down in Christianity’s foundational, defining message of incarnation. Daily I consider Teresa of Avila’s warning: Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours. So divinity is in this bisexual libido and this body that rebels against cosmetics (the evening of my high school prom, my mother chased me around the house insisting, "You will wear blush!), and in these breasts I pumped every two hours for an entire month before a generous woman gave birth to Gwyn, my daughter, so I could nourish her with my milk; divinity is in my heart stilled by prayer and in my frantic churning mind; divinity is in my abundant leg hair which Gwyn tries to braid, calling me Mr. Mom." God has no sense of smell but yours, no capacity to touch but yours, no evolution but yours … I train my bi eyes on all this wretched glory and try to see it.

•  •  •

I need—we all need—progressive lenses. We need to imitate my parents, who recognized my sister’s terrible mistake and chose to love her and her son regardless—who turned to me after I came out and said, We don’t understand this, it might take us a while, but know that we love you. We need to imitate a woman giving birth, holding tightly to her hopes and plans and then releasing them in favor of the mysterious workings of her body. We need to imitate Jeanne Audrey, who at eighty-five was afflicted with aphasia and blindness; she had no living relatives and was steadily losing her ability to read, write, speak, and think. Her letter arrived yesterday. I have had such a full and meaningful life, she wrote. It’s important that you understand that this was not a ‘suicide’ as commonly understood, but it was very much a death with dignity. I hold the page in my hands. Her spirit is alive and kicking there, ardent, strong, and I laugh out loud because with her final act Jeanne Audrey managed to befriend even death.

We’re such beloved bundles of contradictions! I am shaman and shithead; Jesus is God and man; the earth is passive and subtly dynamic; we are all both male and female, absolutely marginalized and fundamentally centered, broken and perfect, unborn and born and always coming alive. There’s a Hasidic tale I love about a Jew who walked through life carrying two verses from the Torah on slips of paper, one in each jacket pocket. He referred to one and then the other throughout the day. In his left pocket the verse read, Dust to dust. In his right pocket the verse read, For you the universe was made. The paradox is acute and resplendent. I am Nobody—who are you? asks Emily Dickinson; I am large; I contain multitudes, exudes Walt Whitman. Both are true. The slips of paper feel heavy in my pockets. I can read only one at a time.

But read them I can! Every morning, this bisexual woman dons bifocals and rises to the work of seeing, really seeing, this sparkling, complicated world.

Cole Bauer grew up in northwest North Dakota and later moved to Minneapolis, where he earned a BA in studies in cinema & media culture and German studies from the University of Minnesota in 2010. He spends much of his free time watching films and birding.

Lipstick Elephants

And so I told her of the tan man, a timeless

New Mexican transformed by desert testing

of speed cars and cloud seeding

and of Michael the drubbed, constantly

a proclaimer of self-defiance who, like a

battering ram

took his beatings on the rocky outcrop

of the steps to his apartment

She laughed, this is nothing

and so I gave her keywords:

tackle boxes, citrus cleaner, Ray-Bans,

beds in Berlin, and by beds, I mean

more than one, days-old sweat

and mystery meat only a German

would swallow

She took a sip of some sweet tea

and denied my advancements

on leaving this conversation

tell me of the last love—

Viktor, the Franklin Bank clerk

and of Ukrainian smooth skin,

with bluebonnet eyes that hid a history

of shipment from Kiev’s most

important regional hospital system

He scratched along in languages

incomplete enough to understand

liquored slurs of hayseed

whose value could have been called

lump sum

Ignoring the fascinating wildlife

of southern meat market offerings with

our tastes for one another

we parted our ways amidst a fling

that shattered the way hayseeds do

business with folks like us

His blues hid it all from me

and I could only nod

She told me

tell of him, the first one, so many

years ago

and so I began

with my first crush, a boy for which I fawned

and jerked my little knob at the back of the bus

hoping, in all secrecy, that he would turn and see

then came the day,