Home and hommage pt 1

Hi y’all,

I wanted to introduce you to a character this week who I resonate with rather deeply, and explore with you why that is, because I think you will like her a lot, too. There is some preambling first, and then I’ll introduce you. As always, feel free to skip the bits that aren’t as interesting to you.

Among the pleasures the current ongoing upheaval in my life since about the turn of 2023/2024 has introduced me to, this period of change that is violent, so painful and difficult, I count discovering that I, with my hardy dour weathered dyke heart, that I indeed like lesbian romance fiction. Like, a lot. As much as I love fantasy and sci fi. In fact, if you want to make me very happy hand me a book that contains all of these. Romance! That is new. I always thought that I should not expose myself to such delusive drivel in order to force my expectations to be more realistic, that the plots surely must be bad, the language clunky, that they one hundred per cent will be ridiculous and at about the level of what German speakers will instantly recognise as a Bastei-Lübbe publication which graces the stands next to the check-out at the local supermarket. You know the ones, with the half-naked male chests and the swooning female with the flowing hair next to it on the cover, done in colourful faux oil painting style. I am sure there is an equivalent in basically every country that allows such display of heteronormative lust next to the small shot-sized bottles of hard liqueur, candy bars and the chewing gum. Anyhow. What I, in my blasé attitude, entirely informed by pride and prejudice (sorry, I couldn’t resist that one), failed to notice is that the market has moved on a fair bit since Jane Austen and the sometimes rather hamfistedly written YA German publications on baby lez fluttering hearts from the 90s. What I have read and listened to so far is actually a lot better than most things available on streaming services, cinema and regular old TV (if anyone is still using the latter). Indeed, maybe infused by manga, comics and graphic novels, we are finally come to the age of wonderful, interesting, well-written and absolutely ridiculously sweet, sexy, tension-infusing and tension-resolving (thank the Goddess for that) lesfic. And I have completely missed this development! I, who started a personal collection of lesbian films and publications in English when I was about fifteen, because nothing was to be had in my first or second language that described me and what I wanted in terms that were not derogatory or condemning me to an early death by my own hand or the hand of some hateful other party. I did that alone, because I did not know a single other gay or queer teen before my first girlfriend. I learned how to be me from fiction, merely shored up by some core values I already had. Reading does not necessarily lead to witchcraft and lesbianism, as the famous Buffy meme goes. But it sure helped along the way. Without Sara Waters’ Tipping The Velvet I surely would have been utterly weird about strap-ons and overthought probably everything about them. To my great detriment. Without Nicola Griffith’s The Blue Place I would not have felt as comfortable with being a tomboy and owning the capable handy butchness that I’ve always had. Or learned that I want to dance with and seduce, and be seduced, by another woman. Or learned to address – that was more of a character and less than an orientation issue – that yes, I had violent feelings and no, they were not making me a horrible person. That I had choices and agency. There is a notable exception in German I want to point out to you, by the way. It’s a book you probably have not read even if you were a 90s lesbian teen, by Werner J. Egli, titled Rosys Liebe. It deals in some very tricky teenage feelings and serious, real life trouble. It is subtle and earnest and tender, and it made me feel so, so seen. So once again, thanks to a straight white dude, this time for writing something profoundly universal and extremely specific at the same time that felt like it was just for me.

All these books were published before e-books. I have never given the hard copies I own away. Even though now a lot of my library is digital, these books are on my shelves as we speak, like pieces of visual art, but often taken down and thumbed through or read again. I am the type of person who gets choked up just telling you this. That is the breadth and width of my nerdiness.

So how did this evolutionary jump in storytelling pass me by? I guess I have been preoccupied. With work, wars, the climate catastrophe, the increasing pressure on my free choice and free will as a (gay) woman. And, sadly, by being in constellations that did not allow me to be joyful and revelling in how marvellous it is that my self is capable of loving another woman (not just any person in general; specifically, another woman), how utterly in awe baby dyke me was and how awed I still am by the bodies and yes, performance and expression, that we specifically have. Revelling normally involves consuming specific cultural output, with me.

I was, however, at times wondering if I ought to be bothered by this: How can I find something attractive which contains aspects of a system that is simultaneously often very damaging? The best and most honest answer for me is, I just do, and it is okay. And maybe I would have served myself better never analysing it at all. Why was it so important for me to dissect what my own body shouted at me, when all it did was be awed and elated and not harming anyone by it? Why did I do this to myself, when I was given such a great gift in knowing so early who I want, and who I am? I realise now I can do both, be aware of the systemic damage we are exposed to, and still be awed and pleased by what I perceive as beautiful, as sexy. I can simultaneously call out the injustice and weirdness a system which favours one type of human over all others inflicts upon us, all of us. And still simply acknowledge that I neither can nor want to exist without the feminine, female, even if it is influenced and to a certain degree shaped by the system. So much is intermingled regarding our desires. I can only strive to not to do harm, and sometimes I may be able to prevent harm done by others – when I am strong and joyful, loved and safe. (Which I am not, to the full extent I long for, right now, and that is not patriarchy’s fault, by the way. It’s just personal.)

I am at the core and the focus of only one, specific, part of the mosaic that makes up the richness of human desire.

In other words, I like what I like.

I need to draw the spotlight of my attention back to what my life is like, what is crucial for me and how I want to walk this earth while I am here. This is not activism, here, see. I am not fighting anyone’s battles anymore but my own. This is just me, feeling lost and afraid, and sometimes hopeful, struggling, striving, trying. Trying so hard to get home. And what set me on my path, gave me the courage and strength to walk the first step and then another, and another, even though I feel all my hard work as a young person to be proud in who I am sometimes feels like it never happened, were romance novels about women falling for one another. It seems I am coming full circle.

Did you, when you were a teenager, fall in love a little or a lot, or maybe fall in attraction and lust, with someone you already knew when you all were kids? Someone you grew up with? I was spared that particular setting, although I fell in love with a friend I met when I was a teenager. But did you? Now imagine that teenager has grown up, lived a good chunk of adult life, been in relationships they were sure would last, and then did not. First of all, this is the part which is so sticky for all of us who have had that experience, is it not? Because how will you know it is right, next time, when it felt right before, when that is all you really have to go on, always, and you don’t ‘want to get it wrong again’? Imagine also you have had all that and a bit of a day too, and now you’re sat at a bar, having a drink. Sprite, because that is who you are. And suddenly, the woman (formerly, once, the girl) you have had feelings for all your life, who should by all rights be somewhere in Nepal or on a Pacific Island or maybe in a desert or literally anywhere else on the whole planet, is walking right up to you with her fantastic legs and her teasing friendly excited smile, nigh-on ecstatic at the sheer unlikeliness of the sight of you, here. It’s been four years or thereabouts since she last blasted through your home town, where you still live, last, and years before that, always on the fringes of your life, always in intervals…

And you are not exactly daring to be happy or excited to see her. She’s your best mate’s big, daring, restless, out-before-you sister. And she is absolutely infuriatingly well-versed in drawing you out, daring you, contradicting you and pushing you constantly from all sides. No pun intended.

Or imagine you have left your hometown as soon as you turned nineteen, because you were so uncomfortable always being the first at everything. The first step-kid, the only step-kid in your family, the eldest child and suddenly being told ‘your mum is not your mum’. The only kid in your family looking decidedly different from the rest of the bunch. The first gay kid. Uncomfortable. At always sticking out, just because you’re you and even though you’re not even actually in any way problematic, knowing full well that even if you were ‘problematic’ you would want to have the courtesy of a modicum of respect and people just minding their own business extended to you. At being known by all and sundry in town by a nickname which others you even more than you already feel othered, like the proverbial square peg. Clearly you’re not fitting in here. And so you got up and left, travelled the world, the bigness of it outside your hometown’s borders. How grand she is, how multitudinous her marvels, and what stories she tells and the people living on her. You’ve been everywhere. You’ve seen so much and lived in so many places, and you never tire of it, moving every couple of months or so, and you’ve been writing about it all, all the time, for almost three decades. You’re so well known for it that it has become your livelihood. You love your life, and life, full stop. You have the gift to love it despite everything. The preciousness and richness of it, it’s depth, it’s marvellous ways of surprising you and gifting you. Your next project is Antarctica, you just stopped over in this place here to gather some belongings and prepare. And then who should you run into but the one aspect of where you come from, apart from your baby sister, which truly makes you think fondly of your origins? There she sits, completely out of her comfort zone, in another town, in a gorgeous suit and with her adorable frown. Good arms. Amazing thighs. Responsible, respectable, and unintentionally extremely intriguing by the very nature of the tight leash she keeps herself on. Just like always. Her name is Brooke, and you, you’re Taylor. And she insists you aren’t friends even though you’ve basically babysat her and known her, always. It is so ridiculous and funny, because clearly by history alone you are something. How can you not be friends, what else would you call it? Her attitude is ludicrous. But it also stings, you notice, just a bit. So. After the day she’s had, she is embarrassed. She would rather you were strangers, for once. For this meeting. And acting how strangers might act, after a hard day, in a strange town, both of you adrift, and finding each other attractive, and being free to do so, and maybe also just a bit sentimental about the way things have turned out in your life, sometimes.

Friends, this is the beginning of a wonderful story. It is by Haley Cass, and it is called In The Long Run. You should want to read it by now, or I am not doing this right. In case I wasn’t, or wasn’t being very obvious: go forth at once and read this book, or listen to the delightful audiobook recording which will send tingles down your spine at how amazingly alive the characters become with Anastasia Watley’s interpretation. Come back to this blog after you’ve done it, promise me you will go read the book before reading further here. Swear to me, in fact. And when you come back, we will talk some more. And maybe you will realise why I say hello here (by the way, no, I’ve not yet been to the Southern US, and I realise my appropriation, but then other people wear lederhosen and dirndl which are my cultural heritage, so let’s not be precious) the way I do, and get why I, who needs to practise daring pathos, sign off with,

as always, Mia.