Notes from Backstage

I love performances – live music, movies, plays, even sports events take on a certain kind of loveliness to me. But my favorite performers are everyday people; their performances are live, candid and fresh. I like to watch them from the other side of coffee shops through car windows and from afar in public forums. Some of the performances that I have enjoyed the most though are the ones with which I have been most intimate – the ones where my friends have designed the lighting or watching someone I know talking to a stranger. All the things that I love about them become new again in watching them deal with something new. I can see how her eyes imagined this sunset and how she designed it. I like being in on that part. I like knowing the art and craft that goes into that performativity.

Gender is also a performance. The way that we wear clothing and take up space and relate to others is all part of complex performance that constitutes gender identity and expression. My steady is genderqueer, doesn’t identify as a man or woman and uses gender neutral pronouns, ‘ze’ and ‘hir’ whenever possible. For hir gender performance is particularly important. The name ze uses is one that folks usually assume is male. Ze presentation is fairly masculine – the performance is important to hir. And most people don’t get to be backstage for that. I am. And sometimes that’s uncomfortable. There is something hard about having the person for whom you perform be the person who is backstage. Not in a cool backstage pass, meet the band kind of way; in a nitty-gritty I’ll do the grunt work kind of way. I love that intimacy – being the one who knows how to help choose a binding, or talking about the consequences of going on hormone therapy. We talk about the parts that are painful and we talk about the consequences. Sometimes my steady worries about letting someone in… I’m the first girlfriend ze has had since starting to blur the gender categories and I think that I’m the first person who has ever been in hir backstage.

My gender is in some ways easier to pin down which makes the performance harder to pin down. I am feminine for the most part, except when I let my inner butch come out and play. But I’m just as anxious about handing out those backstage passes. I don’t know if TP knows that, that for me it is as terrifying to talk about wanting to be equally sexy in a three piece suit and a velvet dress, as it is for hir to talk about hir body and how ze wants it to change.

Sometimes this all puts me in a funny place in the trans community, especially in HarborCity where no one knows TP, and I just look like another femme-ish lesbian on the train. While they are dismissing me, I’m looking for clues -- shorter men, with acne, and a voice that sounds like they have a cold, that extra curve of hip under men’s pants. I notice things I never did before. It’s like being part of a club by only looking through the windows.

A while ago TP mentioned something about how I have a queer body. In that queer theory sort of way. I think of TP’s body as queer all the time; but mine, with the gender identity and sex assignment nicely lined up, I, unfairly, put into the “normal” and straight” categories. However, in reality, my performances pull my body to the edges of woman, but to different edges than the ones that TP goes to with hir performances. Once you add in my desires, and the performances I watch mesmerized and entranced – I’m back behind backstage in this queer liminal place, finding folks to kiss before I know what their genitals might look like. In the meantime, no one even knows that I have a backstage.

I don’t know what implications this might have for my life, this invisible backstage, but welcome, so far only TP and the blogosphere really have a pass.