Zero Plus Zero

Lesbians are nothing. Lesbians don’t exist. This is what I learned, over and over, overtly, explicitly, and then in far more clever ways; first, being inculcated into compulsory heterosexuality, and later, in disguise, from genderists and other “radical” queers. I was eight or nine and I already knew my feelings were “wrong.” I knew when I was younger than that. I knew from early childhood, the first time another girl made me feel strange, “like a boy,” awkward, clumsy, inept, wanting to impress, longing for nearness, aware of a seemingly impassable gulf between my hated self and her seeming perfection. But I was ready to understand something more of what this all meant, beyond the crude jokes told by older boys. I was a punchline and I needed more information. Otherwise I could be manipulated by an older brother who twisted me like a wind-up toy and sent me to tell his rival, “It’s men like you that make women turn lesbo.” My brother, a veritable font of information about the “lesbians” he saw in porn. How, around this time, he used me and another girl-child, a relative, as living props to act these stories out. I called this “wrong” but when I told on him none of the adults agreed. Boys will be. Just kids. You must have. Somehow I was dirty, at fault because this had happened. The problem was not what he did, but that I told.

So when I was eight or nine, I took to my mother’s library in search of answers. I’d already spent long hours there, reading books that would talk to me as though I had sense, or could acquire some–not the patronizing, withholding way adults spoke to me in life. I’d begun to think of Bertrand Russell as a kind of friend who could talk to me about Christianity, which I lived outside of and had felt “less than.” I needed a friend who could tell me what a lesbian was. I’d seen the sex books; they were on the bottom shelf, one I could reach, but they weren’t books I could be caught reading.

I was afraid but I looked anyway. I don’t remember which it was: Joy of Sex, maybe, or Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask. Some groovy optimistic book written in the 1970s, sunshine and earth tones, acceptance for everybody, a reprieve from shame. There was a small section on Lesbians. It said something very close to this:

“Lesbians can’t have sex, because zero plus zero equals zero.”

As 23xx recently wrote, “If gender is binary, women are zeroes and men are ones.” That’s what this “liberated” sex book told me when I was a kid. Being female made me a zero. My cunt, which sufficed to define my totality, was a zero, a hole, an absence, a lack. Further, I was a non-person. I was a blank space, acquiring substance and meaning only through the ordeal of being marked/violated by males.

This was an awful thing to see in a book, because that gave it a different kind of power. It was one thing to be tormented by stupid children or stupider adults. It was quite another to find that a book could join in and agree. Books were supposed to be a refuge, a safe harbor from this sort of thing. So maybe it was true after all. In it went, this message, deeper still.

The first time I really loved another girl, deeply and consciously, I was about fourteen. She was gawky, awkward, brilliant, emo, acne-scarred and gorgeous in a way that was entirely alien to any kind of “beauty” I’d been sold. She was beautiful because she looked like the only conceivable future. She was hope. She way a Way Out. She was everything.

She held my hand in the back seat of the carpool, sometimes falling asleep on my shoulder. I could hardly breathe. She gave me mix tapes of punk songs, let me read her zines. Just as she started to return my feelings, she exited stage left out of my life. (Mostly my egregious fault; another story.) She left me with these fragments of “queercore,” a breadcrumb trail to follow to the future she’d intimated. Nothing hurt more than my culpability for her absence. I wanted to become someone who could have been worthy of her. I followed the trail she left. Some of the first things I sent away for were Outpunk zines and a Tribe 8 album called By the Time We Get to Colorado. I wanted to know more about my kind. If there were more of us it might mitigate the loss somewhat. I could try to be someone who had friends. I had to learn who I needed to be to deserve them.

In Outpunk, I learned the word “transgender.” There were several definitions; one was, “presenting self as a gender blend for emotional comfort.” I thought this must be me. I looked like a little boy, not a teenage girl. I didn’t like the way it felt when people thought of me as a girl. I made a zine about this but everyone who read it was straight. Some of the straight boys thought it was “hot” or a kind of challenge.

In Outpunk, there was information about Leslie Feinberg being ill. It said you could send money to the Column Foundation for a health fund, which was needed because trans people were denied medical care for being trans. I was enraged by the injustice. I put the information in my zine and sent some money. I talked about it to everyone I knew including my family to raise awareness.



“We don’t need the right wing, we got each other; we don’t need the NEA to tell us what to do; our *lesbian* and *gay* sisters and brothers do a better job than those Christian Right mothers…you dine on caviar, we chow on top ramen; you lying to Big Brother about what we got in common, that we’re all a bunch of perverts and deviants, and none of your assimilation will alleviate the fear and hate that emanate from the straight white hope that wants to seal our fate in hell…” I listened to the Tribe 8 album and learned that lesbians and gay men were assimilationist, not only boring but dangerously conservative and reactionary. They were, in fact, as much The Enemy as Jesse Helms.

I knew this wasn’t cogent analysis, even at the time. I knew the internal contradictions were huge, and that there was something disquieting about saying “*lesbian* and *gay*” in such a scathing way that they sounded like slurs. I knew the album cover made me uncomfortable: a woman’s bared breasts with a gun held against them, implying that they would go to Colorado and shoot the people who’d passed bad legislation against gays. But I also believed these women knew things I didn’t–I’d only ever lived at home, and they were out in the world, in a band, making music with political positions. They must know so much more than I did–so I should listen and learn, absorb. In my gut, I knew I didn’t like the song on the album that started with a singsong: “Women’s love, it’s so friendly; women’s love, like herbal tea. Women’s love empowers me” as a sneering parody, and then launched into this, the real message:

I just wanna manipulate my grilfriend/I just wanna play games with her head I want her to do some mental pushups/I want her to apologize and beg It’s a sin/It’s so wrong/I feel guilty as fuck Try to quit/can’t help it/guess it’s just my lousy luck I just want to objectify my girlfriend/I like her cos she’s hot between the sheets I just wanna show her off at parties, dress her up as if she walks the streets It’s a sin, it’s so wrong, I feel guilty as fuck I just wanna slap around my girlfriend, I just wanna make her scream and yell I just wanna tie her to the bedposts and call her nasty names like you evil bitch from hell It’s such a sin, I don’t give a fuck what you think, She loves me so when i do it, gets me high so I don’t have to drink It’s such a sin, it’s so wrong, so what? So I’m a social defect? If it’s a sin, if it’s so wrong- sure is fun being a social reject!

I didn’t like it, but this must mean I didn’t understand it. I would have to learn to accept this, maybe even become this, to have any kind of future. I shoved down the protests from my gut and my brain. I shut them down and indoctrinated myself.

I know I sound like Tipper Gore when I talk about this, but: Tribe 8 are my biggest personal example of why I wish lesbian-feminists had won the sex wars. I wish I’d never heard of them, especially as a kid. The toxic bullshit they spewed kept me confused, sick, and self-hating in some profoundly deep ways, and for a very long time. They were a big part of why it wasn’t “cool” to think of lesbian-feminists as foremothers, as sources of knowledge about how to be a dyke, a woman. They posited these women’s existence as the butt of a joke. They set themselves up as a kind of vanguard, a brave new alternative, something liberated. I read about how they showed those old fuddy-duddies at Michigan how to party when they brought their dildos and sadomasochism to the woods. They were the future. Not at all what I’d imagined, but this was what there was. Be with it or be mocked and left behind. I’d already had enough social exclusion for five lifetimes. And all of this was supposed to be revolutionary because of “who” the band was. They had edgy gender identities, and they were one of the few precious punk bands that wasn’t all white; I felt I needed them, at any cost. All of these were reasons that I made myself shut up and swallowed their garbage whole.

You might think I’d be angrier at Playboy and Penthouse–and my god, do I wish Dworkin and McKinnon had won that fight. I was molested to that shit, maybe because of it. Why did I have to live in a house with that, and with all the violence that comes along with it? Why did I have to learn that “lesbian sex” means being molested by a male? The depth of how this created in me the idea that I exist for male gratification, and that being a lesbian always really involves men, it just means gratifying a male even more because he gets more pussy…It can’t be overstated: how devastating this has been, how demoralized I’ve been. How profoundly compromised.

But in the end, amazing as it sounds, Tribe 8 and their ilk are in some sense more disappointing, because they were lesbians who could’ve and should’ve shown me a real alternative. Instead they taught me that without dominance and submission, violence and dildos, I was nothing. Zero. If I was sick at heart from being so debased and dehumanized, and heaven forfend, wanted women’s love to be friendly and empowering, I couldn’t count among their number.

This was a kind of grooming. These ideas primed me not to value myself as a lesbian or as a female. They showed me that there was no future in being a woman. They taught me that if I wanted to matter I would have to be an exception. I would have to add something to myself, because as is, I was lacking. When I got to college I was ripe for the ravages of queer theory. I’d heard it all before in catchy songs. Everything from genderqueer bullshit to the idea that “the only way out is through so you have to do s/m to recover from sexual abuse.”

Dominant culture on one side; supposedly “transgressive” subculture on the other. Two such disparate groups delivering the same devastating message: You Are Zero. Because they don’t agree on anything else, you seem to be the common denominator. It must be true, then. It must be true.

But it was the biggest lie. I was never the common denominator. The common denominator was outright misogyny.

I found my way out. First, from the delusion that I was male. Then, out of the delusion that being female meant what queerlandia taught me it meant. Then, out of the delusion that lesbian sexuality is nothing, boring, or “vanilla” without the male-made “products” and dominance/submission games everyone was selling so hard.

I’ll never forget how threatened everyone was in the “queer-sex-poz” bubble when, in my twenties, I started showing signs of life, saying what I noticed, asking questions. How disturbed I was when I began to recognize the reversals: in that culture, dykes are supposed to “need” products to have sex–because again, on our own, we are nothing. We don’t exist; so they sell us products like dildos and lube. You’re told that buying lube means you care about female sexual pleasure. I realized that lube is actually literally nothing but a tool for enabling sexual dissociation. This became repugnant to me. The casual presumption that I needed a dildo to have sex, or the “right kind” of sex, became repugnant to me.

Over time I began to hold within myself a secret pride in not needing any of that “stuff” any longer, being whole unto myself, having pleasure in the integrity of my body and my lover’s body–the delicious feeling of being Enough.

Of finally existing.

0 + 0 = ∞