Say hi to Anna Watson, the author of "Bienvenido" in The Harder She Comes.
A World of
Welcome by Anna Watson
Nigh on ten
years ago now, when I finally came all the way out as femme, I had a fantasy
about a debutant party. The party would be a ritual to welcome me into the
world of femmes and butches and to honor my sexuality, long repressed and sadly
neglected. It would be a joyous occasion for all the femmes and butches in the
area, a time to reconfirm our connection to one another, to wallow luxuriously
in our delicious, varied, layered, joyous and oh-so-persistent desire. I imagined
it would be like an adult coming-of-age ceremony, a femme mitzvah, steeped in
sex. There would be a lot of preparation, like shopping dates with more
established femmes who would guide me through the mall, counseling me on makeup
and hairstyle, keeping me company in the lead up to the big event. Butches,
too, would be on hand for escorts and driving, and they would be doing their
own preparations.
My butch beau
and I had a ball filling in the details of this ceremony. Our tale-telling
often led to acting out some of the juicier bits, and the whole thing was just
a bunch of fun. There’s one part of my fictitious Femme Debut, though, that has
stayed in my memory, something that points to the fact that this particular
fantasy was more than a pretty story we were telling each other in bed.
The butler
steps into the ballroom and rings a silver bell, once, twice, three times. The
crowd stills, and looks expectantly his way. The femmes in all their finery
smile at each other, glance in anticipation at the long staircase descending
from the second floor, and move to the center of the room, remembering their
own Debuts. They are dressed in high steam punk to high slut to high domme and
in everything in-between, a riotous flock of color, perfume, cleavage, tattoos,
hair dos and attitude. The butches, whether in full tuxedo or full leather,
hurry into position, one butch to a stair, my own butch beau waiting for me at
the bottom. The butler gives each butch a flower, and rings the bell again. The
crowd is completely silent as I emerge from where I’ve been cloistered with my
closest femme advisors and move towards the top of the staircase. The femmes
kiss me and step aside as I begin to descend. At each step, I stop, and the
butch there hands me a flower. “Welcome,” they say. “Welcome.”
That part would
make me tear up, every time.
Saturday
evening, my butch husband and I went on a date for his birthday (and yes, he’s
the same guy as the above-mentioned butch beau – thank you, butch-femme.com
personals!). Believe me when I tell you we don’t get out much, especially since
he’s been in an MBA program this year, adding an extra exciting element to our
already very busy lives (I don’t think I’ve mentioned that we also have 2
teenage sons, not something for the weak of heart!).
After a lovely
dinner at a funky Chinese restaurant (East by Northeast in Cambridge
http://exnecambridge.com/menu/ – pretentious and expects you to eat lots of
spring peas with chopsticks, but it was damn tasty), we stopped in Davis Square
to see if we could get into one of the films showing at the independent film
festival. We ended up seeing a documentary, “We Are Legion – the Story of the
Hacktivists” http://wearelegionthedocumentary.com/, a world we neither of us
knew anything about (Four-chan? b-tards? Anonymous? Huh?) (Wait, we did know about LOL Cats…), and we were both
completely fascinated with the story of nerds-turned-social-activists sort of
by accident. One of my favorite parts was when one of the male nerds who was
interviewed talked about the heady energy of meeting in person other nerds who
had previously only interacted via the computer, saying something like, “It
wasn’t just guys, like you might think – there were girls. A lot of hot girls
came out! I’d say a whole lot of us got laid that day!”
We need each
other. We need to be seen – our sexualities need to be seen -- by people who,
at least on some level, understand us and get us. There is nothing like it in
the world, especially for persecuted minorities. I love to think of the
Anonymous nerds, finding fellowship and sexual pleasure with one another, and I
loved the Butch/Femme Bashes I was able to get to back in the day, where OH MY
FUCKING GOD THERE WE WERE!!!
Even now that I’m an old married femme lady, I will never forget that deep and
satisfying soul thump of a feeling.
As D.L. King
says in her eloquent introduction to The Harder She Comes, we don’t all do femme/butch alike, and
how boring if we did. We do, however, share something: a love of all the
scrumptious ways butches and femmes get hot and nasty with each other, a basic
need for our sexuality to be recognized, honored, and held on high. As much as
the world around us has changed, as much as access to each other may have
become easier for some of us, we still need to know that there are folks like
us out there, cheering us on. We still need to feel in our cunts and dicks that
this kind of sexuality is alive and right and quintessential and vibrant and
shines its love light right into our souls. I see you. I love you. That’s why I
wrote “Bienvenido” and that’s why this book is so damn wonderful.
Get your copy of
The Harder She Comes: Butch Femme Erotica anywhere good books are sold. To make it easier, you can get it from
Amazon or directly from Cleis Press.
Check out who’s
coming up on the tour and go back and visit the blogs you may have missed. Here’s the schedule:
May 1 D. L. King http://sacchi-green.blogspot.com/
May 2 Anna Watson http://dlkingerotica.blogspot.com
May 3 Evan Mora http://donutsdesires.blogspot.com/
May 4 River Light http://sapphicplanet.com/index.php
May 5 Sinclair Sexsmith http://www.sugarbutch.net/
May 6 Crystal Barela http://kathleenbradean.blogspot.com/
May 7 CS Clark http://bethwylde.wordpress.com/
May 8 Valerie Alexander http://pomofreakshow.com/
May 9 Andrea Dale
http://lulalisbon.wordpress.com/
May 10 Beth Wylde http://adrianakraft.com/blog/
May 11 Kathleen Bradean http://cyvarwydd.blogspot.com/
May 12 Teresa Noelle Roberts http://lisabetsarai.blogspot.com/
May 13 Shanna Germain http://lantoniou.blogspot.com/
May 14 Charlotte Dare http://madeofwords.com/posts/
May 15 Rachel Kramer Bussel http://lustylady.blogspot.com/
Posts
Beautiful, Anna!
ReplyDelete"Femme mitzvah"!
And when you described a pretentious Chinese restaurant in Cambridge, I had a hunch... and, sure enough, it looks from the location that it's likely the same place I remember as Cafe China in the '80s--where, when we asked if a particular tofu dish came with vegetables, the server said it didn't come with "vegetables per se." In plainer language, that meant "no." (It wasn't like it came with a vegetable puree or anything of that nature.) Forever after, the name of that restaurant was Vegetables Per Se, as far as we were concerned.