Spin You Around
Love?? Love!! Love?! Today's newsletter is inspired by my usual country music yearning and recalling bell hooks' all about love.
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I love you. (do you love me? please say it back.)
What a time to be alive right now. I have been thinking about Pride month all year long because my own queerness, my own transness, exists every day of the year inside and outside of June. I spent so many years working at Pride events, connecting to others in my communities through transactions like giving out safer sex kits, important phone numbers, listening to their stories. I am feeling the deep relief of now having at least a few summers between the last time and today. I am feeling deep relief because I was hardly ever there at those Pride events. I mean me as a person was hardly ever there. I was a representative, a mouthpiece, an offering. I did it at the time willingly because I swear to all goddesses that I love my queer community so much more than I ever say.
I love you. (do you love me?) three words that leave us undone, discombobulated, flying high and low, lower than ever, higher than before. It’s a risk any time we say it, even when it’s to someone, including ourselves, that we have said it to before. It’s worth saying out loud, offering out loud obviously and repeatedly. How else will I know where I stand with you in your life? How else will you know where you are in my life if I don’t tell you? Sure the stories we make up in our heads can be extra amazing or terrible or a mix of all things, but what’s even better, even cooler, even more loving is to get out of our heads and into our lives
I follow words. I listen, I explore, I ask out loud, “why these words? why now?” I’ve been listening to this Morgan Wallen song “Spin You Around 1/24” for weeks and weeks now. I thought it was to announce someone who crossed paths with me for a moment. That person came and went, though it was only in the going that I understood when they said “I don’t want to fall in love” they meant “I am selectively avoiding feelings and emotions.” Sometimes you fork around and find out. Well I found out that when my guts tell me to listen a layer deeper, listen to my guts.
I've been lookin' at you from across the room
'Bout time I got my nerve
Well you might tell me, "Boy, hell naw"
But hell, what can it hurt?
'Cause I just wanna
Spin you 'round, and 'round this dance floor
Get you drunk on a love like mine
Might wind up and steal a couple kisses
Get your digits if I can find the right line
And you don't do feelin's, then baby, if you're willin'
I'ma do my best to change your mind
It was in my rumble of guts that I realized that one more time I said Yes to another queer person because I believed they might want to know me as a person, as another human, as an embodiment of queer love. Because to me, queer means outside the bounds of conformity, pushing against and crumbling all the harmful paternalistic, misogynistic, sexist ways that us queer folks inherited from centuries of subjugation based heterosexuality and sameness. Maybe my biggest lesson in all of this is when I am interested to know someone who calls themself ‘queer’ I need to start asking at the beginning, “When you call yourself Queer, what do YOU mean by that?” I make assumptions and later my best self reminds me I knew and hoped that maybe this time was different. I take chances and know I’ll be hurt. Because I know that just because I am queer doesn’t mean I won’t harm others. So in that logic, others who are queer are capable of harming me. I take the risk with eyes wide open and a bruised heart still healing. And one more time I said yes to a transaction that took from me and returned nothing. I wasn’t left better than before.
I love being queer! I love taking chances at living a life that is anything but the one given to me by my parents, by the south’s way of forcing good ol’ boys on us, anything but the fractured ways in which we don’t love each other but will swear on a bottle of whiskey we do. This is a love letter to everyone reading who yearns for your own queerness, for the world to come when we finally FINALLY shed this thing we do to each other that exists regardless of sexualities, regardless of gender, regardless of who we kiss, have sex with, marry, divorce, make families with. I love being queer and wouldn’t change it for anything in this world. I feel so strongly in that. This year is my 20th anniversary of using the identifier Queer for myself. Because I believe so deeply in the concept of Queerness, of us reclaiming LOVE, respect, care, trust, communication, and goodness in handling each other. But we are doing it wrong. We are recycling the hurts at each other. That’s not queer to me. That’s acting in the cycles of centuries that no longer deserve the light of day.
I will keep trying. It seems most days I meet other Queer people, especially in the Pacific Northwest, I hear about bell hooks’ “all about love” and a peppering of quotes here and there. I want to be clear: I have also read “all about love” and the thing she got so dialed in perfectly in this book is this passage. Because when I read “little boys” I think of literally everyone who has grown up in this world in this last 50 years:
"...the masculine identity offered men as an ideal in patriarchal culture is one that requires all males to invent and invest in a false self. From the moment little boys are taught they should not cry or express hurt feelings of loneliness or pain, that they must be tough, they are learning how to mask true feelings. In the worst-case scenarios they are learning how not to feel anything, ever." - bell hooks, all about love.
I love the songs Morgan Wallen sings. Do I believe him? Not one bit. Do I believe he feels ANYTHING? Absolutely I do. And I think he’s a perfect example of the boys I grew up with: make you believe that he feels by singing a pretty song, but when it comes down to it, he won’t meet you on the bridge of relationship. His songs are great! I don’t listen to them for him. I listen because the stories in songs stir my heart. I believe even Morgan Wallen, a good ol country boy who has a deeply codependent relationship with alcohol and maybe some other stuff, yearns. And avoids that yearning like hell.
Because loneliness and pain are to be chased away. Don’t be uncomfortable, don’t stay uncomfortable. Fix it and fill the void, move on.
I get incredibly frustrated, sad, and also inflamed with new purpose, when I experience other Queer people doing the Morgan Wallen bit. Why chase away love? Why deny connecting to others, queer or not? Why are we STILL doing this in 2024 where feelings are bad, not to be felt, emotions are to be stuffed away until they explode all over the people you didn’t actually WANT to hurt.
In the worst-case scenarios they are learning how not to feel anything, ever.
This cannot be our present. This absolutely cannot be our future. The song “Spin You Around” wasn’t about one more Avoidant I said yes to. It’s about my entire communities of people who claim Queer for themselves, for ourselves. I’m coming for you, angels. I left behind performative heterosexuality a long time ago. (No judgment on those of you non-queers reading this! Y’all do you! Also there’s other ways of being?) I will do my very best to agitate the hell out of everyone I know, meet, engage with who claims Queer. Do better, be better. Do better than the harmful ways cold masculinity taught us to shut down emotions. Do better than the harmful ways that people take advantage of the feminized labor that caregivers like me offer. Do better than laughing at your mothers and others who would turn themselves out to keep you fed, clothed, housed, and surviving. Do better than acting like one more goddamn white straight man in this world who needs nothing more than to be literally heart to heart with another person to maybe melt the iciness that keeps us held down.
I believe in us. I do.
And I firmly believe that queerness is NOT the hard edge of sabotage, constant push/pull dynamics to get attention. It’s not self imposed loneliness, it absolutely cannot be transactions vs relating to each other. And finally, my queer life does not include intentional avoidance of feelings and emotions.
“Care and affirmation, the opposite of abuse and humiliation, are the foundation of love.” - bell hook, all about love.
Happy Pride month. We do owe it to Sylvia, Marsha, and Miss Major in addition to the thousands of names of queer elders we will never know, to get right with ourselves. Getting right is getting into relationship with your own healing so the cycles break across us. You have to do this, though, with other people. Take a chance.
And you don't do feelin's, then baby, if you're willin'
I'ma do my best to change your mind
I love you. I’m coming for us until my last breath on this earth.