More Afterglow

If you haven't noticed, I have very much been dwelling in afterglow from my crazy week. This Monday-Thursday were perhaps the busiest I've been in a very long time. I got very little sleep and survived on coffee, grading papers in the wee hours of the morning so that I could linger over dinners and conversations with friends. By the time I had to teach on Thursday, I was positively manic, but I loved every minute of it.

But by now my real life has come crashing back, and I realize that one of the things I value most about the past few days was that I got to spend all of my time in queer spaces. Between the performance on Monday and Wednesday's Shotgun Ladies' Night at The Eagle in Silverlake (remind me to go back on the first Wednesday of the month for their Gendronaut drag show), I spent all my time with queer folks, discussing queer issues, feeling femme and proud of the fact. Though my feet sometimes hurt, wearing heels and a dress all day on Monday made me really happy. I got to engage in flirting with cute guys and girls, and I was in a space with some people I know well, many people I know but would like to know better, and several people I don't know but would love to meet. It was 4 days of playing with gender signs and gender binaries, of not always knowing what pronoun to use and loving it.

It's in these times and places when feeling femme really feels right to me. Femme invisibility usually feels like such a cliche to me in general, but it was so refreshing to be dressed up and queer and out and visible because I was surrounded by others who were out and queer and visible and who seemed to accept me as such. And it was also nice that it wasn't in a dating context. That this was just my way of being queer, and that it meant I only had to be as feminine as I wanted to be. I could iron Turner's shirts and call the show and strike and in general kick ass and feel girly and powerful at the same time. It's a sadly rare set of feelings for me. And it's so weird how much my sense of myself as a stage manager and my sense of myself as queer and femme are wrapped up in each other.

The whole thing made me want to run away and join the queer circus, or at least run away and tour as Turner's stage manager for a while. I know that's not the life for me in the long run, and I know I'm doing the right thing for me in academia, but when you touch something as amazing as the time I've spent in the past week, it's hard to go back to everyday life and work.