Hi there, homophiles!
This summer is getting on my fucking nerves.
Here's why:
I live across the street from a Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
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Now, this was a selling point when we looked at the apartment last year.
It would be so pretty, right? We'd look out our front window and see green, well-manicured lawns.
We'd see priests in odd hats.
Mosaics and shit.
We were thrilled.
There was actually a choir singing as we signed the lease.
How quaint!
Well, as it turns out, this branch of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church likes to throw parties.
At least once a week, they rent out a sound system and have themselves one helluva polka party.
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All the neighborhood old people come to dance, and there's a rummage sale, and a wiener roast, and lots of beer drinking. Rousing choruses of old country songs. Right across the street!
Fun, right?
Drunken Ukrainian karaoke ensues.
Until about 3 in the morning.
I used to think this was charming - an adorable quirk of my neighborhood.
But now...I would do anything to get the Ukrainian polka music to stop.
Do you hear me.
ANYTHING.
The church members don't care that the whole neighborhood calls the police every Friday and Saturday night since summer started - the congregation is first-generation, they're all in their seventies and eighties, and they're all tough as fuck.
They're like, "Ooh, look, the cops are here. We're making too much noise. Well, guess what, officer? We survived Chernobyl. What now, bitch?"
Hmph.
I'm also sulking because I have been humiliated this summer.
I went to a party last week, and while I was publicly mocking CJ for thinking the words to 'Besame Mucho' were 'Tresemme Mucho' (so, what - kiss me, but make sure you have plenty of volume and shine?), she got fed up and accidentally-on-purpose let it slip to a room full of lesbians that I failed Women's Studies in college.
My secret! My closely-guarded lesbian secret! CJ told on me!
The room went silent.
Twenty pairs of lesbian eyes cut to me. Twenty sets of lesbian lips quirked upwards.
There was a split-second of quiet, and then...
Twenty lesbians started laughing at me.
Laughing! At me! Not with me - at me!
The shame! The unmitigated shame!
That's the last time I tell lil' CJ anything.
My secret's out.
And fuckit, I might as well tell y'all - it's a true story.
I failed Women's Studies in college.
Failed. Got an F.
But homos, it wasn't my fault.
I was 20 and newly gay. I was dying to have a girlfriend, and I had heard that Women's Studies classes were full of lesbians.
So I signed up for Women's Studies to meet girls.
Brilliant, right?
Probably no baby dyke in the history of the world had ever thought of that before.
But when I showed up, pink with excitement, for the first day... there wasn't a single cute girl in my class.
Except for one.
My professor.
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My professor, Sharada, was an incredibly beautiful Indian woman who had this long, black, shiny, thick braid.
You guys, it fell past her knees.
I had never seen anything like her.
Sharada was in her mid-40's and had gorgeous brown skin and liquid dark eyes. She wore dangly gold earrings that shimmered in the light. She talked really fast, had skinny wrists, and perched on the top of the table in the front of the room as she taught.
It was love at first sight.
My god. My GOD.
Sharada could have been talking about anything - I was captivated.
As I stared at her, week after week, phrases like "the other" and "culture of oppression" came swimming to my ears like something out of a golden dream.
I blinked and nodded for months.
Whatever she said.
Societal expectations. Normative. Patriarchal structure.
Whatever.
I sat in the front row, inhaled Sharada's smell, and never missed a class.
So...I didn't pay attention.
But here's the reason I failed:
Every day, while sitting on the table expounding about the history of feminism, Sharada would pull her braid into her hands and absentmindedly undo it.
She would talk to us about matriarchal civilizations while dipping her fingers through that thick twist of black, silky hair.
Cool black water running though her hands. A slinky snake of shininess.
I was transfixed.
What the fuck.
What was she trying to do to me?
All I wanted was to bury my face in that hair.
Or, um, lay naked while Sharada cloaked my body with her midnight tresses.
When the final exam (80% of our grade) came, it was like being startled awake while sleepwalking.
I stared at the pages of the test in shock - the questions were like a foreign language.
The essays I simply skipped.
Women's Studies, to date, remains the only class I have ever failed.
And the irony is that I failed because I was studying a woman.
Gayelles, a few years later, I looked at my notebook from that class.
Apart from approximately 33 sketches of a faceless woman with long black hair, I never took a single note.
There is not one note.
Not one date - not one sentence in my Women's Studies notebook from Fall Semester 2004.
Twinks, I always kinda thought that failing Women's Studies made me a "bad" lesbian.
That's why I never told anybody about it.
It's something that goes against the culture of our tribe.
It's like being a beaver who wants to take Irish clogging instead of learn how to build a dam.
It's something that simply isn't done. It's on par with not knowing who Ani DiFranco is or not having a crush on Angelina Jolie.
It's like being a dyke who's repulsed by vaginas.
It's like admitting that you've never read The Well of Loneliness or getting drunk and telling a bar full of lezzes that you've always found k.d. lang to be a little cheesy.
WHAT KIND OF A LESBIAN ARE YOU???
So now I have a question for you, queers:
What's YOUR dirty little secret? What makes YOU a bad lesbian?
[via lesfemmes]
Please tell me. I could use some comforting right now.
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