Wild Reeds

I have often been a tad embarassed about my former life as a fag hag, in both Portland and Berkeley, for two reasons: 1. since it often signals a retreat from a history of complicated and often traumatic encounters with heterosexual men, being a fag hag can reveal too much. Though I am pretty open, when asked, about my personal history, I am also (paradoxically) intensely private about it. As a fag hag, a girl becomes a legible text: "I am retreating from hetero men because...." 2. fag hags have often become caricatures of themselves, falling for gay boys and enacting one of the most annoying versions of camp in queer communities: the endless pursuit of the beautiful, unobtainable homo boy. There is a glamour to it, a fantasy of a safe community of men and women whose patterns of desire often muddle their middle-class heteronormative upbringings. But I've always felt there was something more to my desire to firmly ensconce myself in a gay communities, as the token straight girl who walked protest marches and volunteered for political and personal gay causes.

Tonight, as I read on of my professor's new books, I had a revelation prompted by one of her core arguments: fag hags are what they are because they are able to situate themselves as desiring subjects (in gay male clubs, watching gay porn, etc) without having to serve the function (to which they are so accustomed) of a desiring object. We can watch our boys, desire them, fantatasize about them, and love them but in such a way that alters the patterns of desire located (or dislocated) around the female body--ways that, as JD notes, are richly empowering: to desire without the burden of being desired (a burden women feel daily, hourly). It is a different way of thinking about sexual desire in relation to the public and private: in order to alleviate myself from the burden of being a desired object, I can remove myself from the public sphere and, like Emily Dickinson, retreat into my writing, the music I listen to, etc. But, like any good fag hag, I like to dance, I like to watch boys, I like to watch boys in the act of loving and or fucking other boys. In gay male clubs or bars, I can alleviate the burden without having to cordon-off my own desire for men's bodies. I like this approach to being a fag hag. It sits in such a way that is far less reductive than the descriptions of fag hags as pathologized subjects who simply appropriate the "freedom" to love and be loved outisde the bounds of stifling heteronormativity.

This brings me to the film Wild Reeds. I saw this at the UA Theater in 1995 in Berkeley with Aaron (ah, infamous, semi-closeted Aaron), whom I loved above all things at the time (so much so that I saved and still have the movie ticket). In the film, two French boys discover one another and flesh out their love and desire for one another as one of the boy's female friends (who is, ack! in love with him) sits painfully by and watches their desire play out. I remember weeping openly in the theater, much to Aaron's discomfort. I remember running out of the theater and down the street after the film was over, running behind bushes and hiding while I sobbed. This was a boy who had kept me up late at nights, spurred my insomnia--my desire for his body had often filled my head and kept it humming until the lovely blue light of 5 a.m. I've often wondered why I responded so strongly to Wild Reeds, beside the obvious sense of empathy with the girl in the film and her unrequitted love. I think I fell apart because I realized that in the triangulation of desire between the two boys and my boy I would never ever be an object of desire within this queer space. No one could have told me at the time that watching this triangulation play out was an empowering queer space because I could idly sit by and be the desiring subject--I would have scratched their eyes out. Telling me this in the moment, or other moments where I was exquisitely tortured by my love for Aaron, would not have taken into consideration (and still does not) the sheer push and pull of desire, and the visceral longing I had for Aaron; the complicated, messy relationship that I had with him for almost 3 years. I simply loved him and I was heartbroken.

Theory often does not account for the wild, emotional abandon that occurs in the early hours, the protracted, palpable emotional russian roulette that many of us play as we desire one another.