mother of the house of schecter

That voice drops out of that body: I get the sense of trying to hold a whole birthday cake on a single-ply paper napkin.

The limbs of that body are sticks. If it were a boy, it’d be told to lift some weights and gain more muscle. If it were a female, it’d be told to eat some food and get some curves. I know that that grey sweater is a cashmere Marc Jacobs sweatshirt (even on 60 percent off sale, cost a pretty penny) but on that body it looks like what I was afraid it would look like, a cross between a wimpy football player and Warner Bros. era Joan Crawford. Which would be fine except I was going for the look I always go for: Bettie Page in repose had she been 28 years old in 1994.

That voice is so low, lower than I remember it. I know I have a low voice, the voice I was genetically programmed for, and I’ve not been unhappy with it. When I was a DJ at the University of Virginia’s student radio station (for a whole month: my show was the unwanted early Sunday morning slot and I couldn’t get up at 7:00 to save my life: an hour of dead-air time: I was fired—from a volunteer job!), the woman who trained me said I had a “Venus Flytrap” voice. “Venus Flytrap” was the character played by Tim Reid on the late 70s sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati.

see and hear the original Venus Flytrap

How perfect is that: a man named Venus! I love that compliment still not because my voice sounded like the race I most closely identify with (African-American) but also because it got linked, through that character, to the kind of femininity towards which I strive: a bizarrely beautiful flower that eats little bugs that try to eat it.

But loving that voice is one thing; seeing that voice is another. The voice and the body together formed a drag queen. As soon as that vision hobbles over to the stage, it begins to whooping and kvetching sugary tourettes. For the next half hour, it’s like the voice is the body’s muppeteer, the femme cadencing of the unobviably deep male voice snapping the neck into endless hair-tossing, yanking the hand to hair-swiping, and at one point, even pulling up the mini Bardot-bump at the back of the head. My mother, who recently watched this video, said, “I didn’t really get the content of what you were reading, but it was so chic when you kept touching your hair. Your hand moved really elegantly.” In fact, she did get the content of the words that my deep drag queen voice was puking into the coiled microphone in front of me. This is my mode of femme realness performance: eyes cast down, reading into the microphone, fingers in hair: the shy book-obsessed kid who turned his shyness into a career and gender. With that voice and the body, my presentation of work at an academic conference turns me not into a scholar but as writer-as-drag queen.

The complete video of my draggy reading:

I wrote the story “Gertrude Ederle,” last spring in California, during my half-sabbatical from RISD. It’s one of four stories I wrote during those five months. I hadn’t written fiction since my second year in graduate school, when I was so unhappy and disillusioned that I had to punch out a 300-page novel in a three-month spurt. The unpublished novel now sits like a miscarried fetus in the back of my hard drive, and my Ph.D. was finished and received. But just when I was materially settled, I began feeling the same kind of desperation again, and so I had to go back to writing fiction. Not necessarily to build a new offshoot of a career, but just so I can live.

I presented “Gertrude Ederle” earlier this month at Princeton as a part of a conference called “Too Cute: American Style and the New Asian Cool,” and watching the video of my reading is like, PRINCETON IS BURNING! If drag queens crystallize their identity through lip-synching diva songs, then I become a drag queen by lip-synching my own piece of fiction. I’ve lived with my femininity for so long I forgot that I only know how this femininity feels against the underside of my skin; I didn’t really know its performative force. At first I was horrified, but gradually it sunk in, and by the end, I was quite tickled by this femme monster before me. I actually felt as I did the first time I saw Jennie Livingston’s documentary Paris is Burning.

Paris is Burning documents black and Latin transsexuals and drag queens in late 80s Harlem, and the kind of nurturing underground community they created as a permeable but steely barrier to the racism and homophobia that was the material reality of their daily lives. One of the most important aspects of this community was the idea of the “House,” which is described in the film by the late great Dorian Corey, alternately as “a gay street gang” and “family.” The leader of such a house is a “Mother.” But the Mother does not become the Mother through democracy—not the traditional kind of democracy, anyway. The houses get started by drag queens who “make a name for themselves” in the ball circuit: she is a great voguer, an extradecaden self-presenter, a hyperreal femme: she is one who overachieves in the discipline of drag femininity. She becomes Mother because she votes herself as Mother. I say she “votes herself” rather than “declares herself” because her creating her house is an act of faith: her self-naming, and naming her house after that self-naming, is a performance of the faith she has in collecting the “children” who would vote for her.

So today, humbly following in the grand tradition of Saint Laurent and Xtravaganza, I’d like to announce my candidacy for Motherhood. I am the Mother of the House of Schecter. I know there are children out there. Formal recruitment will begin soon, but in the meantime, if you are reading this and like it, click on my haggy picture on the sidebar to my facebook page and fan up! I’ll be adding recruitment info about the House of Schecter...as soon as I figure it all out!!!! The shade of my pancake foundation is the English language. I vogue to the rhythm of syntax. I tuck my tool into the crevices of my sentences.

As the legendary Mothers transformed their bodies through performances of femaleness, I do so upon my prose. In my teens, I was frightened of transsexualism surgery. In my tweenties, I couldn’t afford transsexualism surgery. In my twenties, I got married and didn’t need transsexualism surgery. Now in my thirties, I know that the best transsexualism surgery for me involves not the technology of knife, laser and silicone, but the prosthetic technology of prose. I cut and inject my body with my words, and with that embodiment comes dissipation. Dissipation, blissful dissipation. With my prose, I dissipate my physical body into emotional and conceptual molecules; when I don’t feel my body, I know my words are working. They shatter scatter my fleshly body. When that’s done, I know there’s a boy out there who will see my body and want to hold it because he will see not maleness, but what I see, a hollowware for femininity.

it takes two...

A couple Saturdays ago, my partner-in-crime Trace made this observation as if she were welcoming an old friend: “You’re wearing your favorite shirt!” So I was: an original, circa mid-1970s tee-shirt in glorious beige emblazoned with the image of one of my favorite records, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. Or more accurately: so it seemed as though I were wearing my favorite shirt. In fact, I was wearing a copy of my favorite shirt. And when I say “copy,” I don’t mean “reproduction,” an icky knock-off with a computer-scanned image ink-jetted onto an American Apparel shirt. No, I mean a literal copy: I’ve been owning a 70s Rumours tee that I bought in Berkeley back in 1998, but the shirt I was wearing when hanging out with Trace was another 70s original that I recently bought on ebay by sheer dumb luck/ fated miracle. Yes, I possess two of the same old and used tee-shirt.

Hence the images above, which is actually not the same photo or even two photos of me in the same outfit but two different photos that look the same from afar. In the first photo, I’m wearing my first vintage Rumours shirt, the one bought in 1998. In the second, I’m wearing my new vintage Rumours shirt, bought 2010. Even though I do collect all kinds of Fleetwood Mac shirts, I love this specific model of shirt most of all because one, the image: the quasi-Victorian meets ballet meets sorcery: that’s me. Also, printed on beige, it’s roughly the tone of nude pantyhose. Wearing it, I feel chicly redundant, like I’m wearing my own skin over my own skin. The two shirts above are almost identical, save the idiosyncrasies of wear-and-tear of the decades. The Berkeley one was pretty worn when I bought it. It was already so soft from repeated wearing that for my “wild” twenties, it was my favorite shirt to wear on hangover Sundays: aaaahh the memory of sitting around watching old Joan Crawford movies eating pizza or Jack-in-the-Box while in a state of painful yet fuzzily comforting debilitation, snuggled against a solid sofa of a husband body, cocooned in a tee shirt that spoke to the unique alchemy of tee shirts: cotton can become silk through years of abuse. So now, having logged twelve years of wear on this war-torn body, it’s become almost transparent, the neckhole rib stretched beyond bounce.

The second copy of the shirt is in a weird condition. Textile-wise, it is in much better shape—the cotton is soft but not thin, not near translucence. Judging by the length of the torso, the crispness of the tell-tale 70s tag and the intense black of the silk screen, it was worn but hasn’t been washed and dried. It probably spent most of its life in storage. Yet it has strange black-edged holes all over that look like cigarette burns. And there is one particular hole that punctures the “O” in “Rumours” that Trace said is “shaped like a heart.” Weirdly, the hole goes all the way through the back of the shirt, as if someone really did put out a cigarette on the shirt while it was lying helpless on a table. The cigarette hole is, appropriately enough, on the left side, so the hole is literally over my heart. So when I wear it, I feel all cheesily romantic—like someone put a cigarette out on my heart. (Awwwwwww)

Some people buy two (or three) of the same piece of the clothing for practical reasons: it fits so well, why not have a back-up, to rotate or replace? I do this too. But mostly I buy multiple copies of clothes to protect my heart against loss. My fear of loss borders on neurotic. As a child, I used to spend half my allowance in dime form, not at a candy machine but on the Xerox machine at the public library. I made endless black-and-white photocopies of pictures I loved from books I loved—starting with Joan Walsh Anglund and Dare Wright books of cute doll-girls, then moving on to stills of Audrey Hepburn, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Rita Hayworth, Cary Grant, and Johnny Weissmuller. The piles and piles of photocopies were a poor kid’s way of owning books that he couldn’t buy. But as I grew older, it became a process of the way my heart worked: it became a delusional insurance against loss. If I copied these books that I knew couldn’t be mine, I could always have them with me even when the books got checked out or lost. They were poor copies (although Crawford and Davis in particular retain shape well in Xerox) but they were mine to keep with me, between the pages of the math textbook, in my underwear, as the backside of my own drawings. As I aged, I didn’t stop copying, and I’m still a bit copy-crazed. I copy Mary Karr and Sylvia Plath’s poems, passages from Mary Gaitskill and Toni Morrison, memoirs of Judith Jamison, because they are words sure to produce feelings that I knew I wanted to keep forever: love.

The copier in the Liberal Arts Division office of RISD was broken the first week of classes this semester, so I had to hand out course syllabi to my students that had black carbon crud all over them. I apologized to my classes, but secretly I kind of liked it that I was getting all sooty because it was a distilled version of my compulsion to copy. It’s how I want to exist as a human, emotionally speaking: constantly stained by the granules of my feelings. I fear the loss of love like I fear the loss of my Rumours shirt: as an inevitability. If boys can always turn around and leave, so can shirts.

Here is how I used to experience love before I met my now ex-husband: I’d fall in love with boys as not a gay boy but as a girl. This kind of love didn’t take too long to implode because regardless of their sexual orientation, the boy preferred either a real live (genetic) girl to one whose femaleness was merely emotional-psychological-political (me) or a male homosexual who was a real boy inside (not me). I guess this actually did lead to masochism, and a lot of bad behavior in the way of dramatically self-hating girls whose self-hating was often a form of glamour. But then, in 1997, I met a bona-fide faggot who truly loved—or rather, and this is an important and beautiful specification, tried with all his might to love—a boy who was really a girl inside. He promised he’d love me forever and the Xeorx-crazed kid in my head fought like crazy against the lifeguard, but soon got fatigued and relaxed into his rescue.

We got hitched and went on a real Elizabeth Taylor-and-Richard Burton-esque ride that lasted basically a decade. The self-hating and self-laceration at not being a “real girl” stopped, and I fully embraced being a wife. But the marriage itself eventually fell apart. Why, who knows. But I think it had something to do with what J.L. Austin said: “to promise is not to try to do anything.” So now that I am back to being a single girl, once again I find myself falling back into that old feeling of ecstatic disintegration. In my teens and twenties, I thought that my body would hold its outline together and make sense if I just had enough sex with boys. I admit, I didn’t have all that much sex, but each perverse action would bring me closer to recognizing this squishy sausage of bones as “my body.” Now that I am in my thirties, things are different. While I have a comfortable sense of who I am, I now have a hard time even imagining sex with boys I love. When I try, I can’t see or feel my body. Sexual fantasy doesn’t happen because my body has become nothing.

I think I need two of my favorite tee-shirts, like I need two’s of my favorite jeans or sweaters , for this reason: because the truth is, using my feelings to connect with people often makes me feel like I don’t have a body at all. With these copied clothes, it’s like I’m Xeroxing myself over and over, but this time I’m not insuring against the loss of library books but against the loss of myself.

I think I’m in love again because he makes me feel like nothing. Not in a masochistic way of “I’m nothing” but “nothing” as in “nothingness.” My body rattles with such uncertainty of itself that I’m afraid my cells will rattle right out of their skin and I will disintegrate into a pile of slimy, granular stuff.