Being a Bitchy Queer Is Not Innate

Being bitchy, catty, and so forth is not innate. Sure, there may be hormones involved, but it's mostly a learned behavior. In some cases it's even a safety valve on the pressure cooker of other feelings: people are often bitchier when life is fucking them up in other ways.

And sometimes it's a good thing to let out your dark side to play, for an afternoon, or a day. You can't let your dark side take over, or possess you—and it's not about Control, it's about mastery. Frankly, some drama queens I know are so completely unaware of their own feelings that they ARE possessed.

There's a vicious circle around feeling abandoned and zero self-esteem, then being a bitchy queen that drives everyone away because it's a defense mechanism to be bitchy, then feeling abandoned. Being bitchy is a kind of armor, that keeps people from being able to hurt you: you hurt them first, so everybody's armor is up all the time. When's the last time a bitchy drama queen of your acquaintance was genuinely able to express to you feelings that were not corrosive emotions? Bitchiness is armor. People are afraid of getting hurt, of letting themselves be vulnerable, of being soft enough to be vulnerable enough to express real feelings and risk getting hurt. If you think it's all about their hormones, it's because they let it be all about their hormones. All women carry estrogen, but not all of them are bitchy.

It's not innate. It's learned. Defense mechanisms are learned behaviors that start hardening into armor at a very early age. We use those behaviors because we learn that they can protect us—at least in the short term. The problem is, when we grow up, and no longer need such protection, letting go of the learned defense mechanism is often the biggest challenge most adults face, the hardest thing that there is to do. It's a lot easier to keep going with what you already know (inertia, momentum) than it is to learn to do things differently (genuine change). When we're adults, those learned defense mechanisms often no longer serve us well—in fact, they often keep us feeling lonely and abandoned and isolated. Unlearning them is seriously hard work, for most people, and can take a long time.

The saying "You cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven unless you become like little children again" has two meanings: From the mystical direction, it means letting go of ideologies and theologies that block you from experiencing the direct encounter with the Divine—which is everybody's birthright—because the Kingdom of Heaven is supposed to be Right Here, Right Now, not in some unknown afterlife. From the psychological direction, it means shedding all those learned defense mechanisms so that we can see like little children again, before we started building our defenses, like little children who see the world with wonder, magical vision, and joy in all things. Young children, before we start beating hard lessons into them, already live in the Kingdom of Heaven; our job is to unlearn all out defenses, and get back there. We already know what it feels like—if only we would let ourselves remember.

No one is born hard, bitter, bitchy, and corrosive to those around them. People become what they are through experience, through lessons learned, through armor added on because we got hurt. The hardest thing I know of is taking off the armor and learning to trust again. People say they have faith in God—but most really don't, because they don't really trust God—because when it comes to entering the Kingdom of Heaven trust, surrender, and faith are all the same thing under different names. I struggle with this myself. I finally reached a point where the lesson sank into me: Trust that which I already know to be trustworthy, and let go of the rest. (And whole books have been written about theodicy, the question of why bad things happen to good people, and why God has a dark side. I won't go into that here, because it's too big a topic and frankly most people let it go right over their heads, and I don't want to get into it right now.)

And sometimes you have to let out your dark side, to play, in small amounts, like a steam release valve on a pressure cooker. You let off a little steam at a time, so that the whole system doesn't self-destruct. That's actually healthy. The best way I know how to do that is to do it as play: make a game of it.

There was one Radical Faerie Beltane Gathering at Short Mountain in TN that I went to—not my frist gathering, not my last at the Mountain till now—when I made good friends with a few guys who'd driven down for Gathering from Montreal. One of them was deaf, who taught us all how to swear in Sign. There was a pack of about four of us, and we hung out a lot during Gathering. On the last day, after the big celebrations and rituals and events and dinners, when everything was winding down, it was a rainy, dull day, and we were all tired. We'd had a great Gathering, and tomorrow we'd pack up and leave.

But that one last afternoon, because it was rainy, because we had all had some very amazing uplifting and powerful experiences, we all decided, as a pack, to spend the afternoon being bitchy. We wandered around camp being completely judgmental, mocking everything and everybody, being the nastiest, cattiest, most evil queens we could be. it was the most fun I had all Gathering, and it was a huge release of pent-up feelings.

We didn't do this in any way that anybody knew what we were doing. It was all remote mockery, from a distance. Telefactored dissing. Robot-probe-on-alien-planet mocekry. Nobody got offended, and we hurt no one. We did it all under our breath to ourself, to our pack, and at least partially in Sign. Often we burst out in guffaws at a particularly rude judgment, and heads turned, but no-one ever knew what we were laughing about.

But it was tremendous fun, and we had a great afternoon. And no one got hurt.

We let out our dark sides, our bitchiest queen sides, and had a ball.

And then we were done, and we hugged and kissed our goodbyes the next day, and drove on. Oh yeah, and we did meet up one last time to have dinner together near Mammoth, KY, on the way north. And there wasn't a queen bitch moment during dinner, not one. We'd gotten it all out of our system. And we laughed really hard, both at everyone else that we had been mocking all day, and at ourselves.

Release valves.

The thing is, we chose to be bitchy all day. It was a conscious choice to have fun being bad. We even talked about it among ourselves.

None of this shit is innate. It's all something we learn, it's all something we still have a choice about—we can choose to do it differently, each time it comes up. No one is condemned or fated to be a bitch. That's a choice. If they can't control their bitchiness, then they need to look into their shadow, because they've been possessed, and aren't in control, at all. But even that can be worked with. Unlearning a bad habit is just like learning a good habit: all it takes is repetition and practice.

Returning from Elsewhere: Narratives

Well. I'm back.

From eight days camping in the Northwoods. Off the grid. Off the map, even. From dipping into Lake Superior's mists and shoals. From No Place Between. Northernmost Minnesota, above the Lake, in the Arrowhead counties that have few paved roads once you leave the shoreside highways and towns behind. Where they call the region The Top Of The Map. Where you're as close to Canada as you can get without treading waterlines, where you're closer in mood and art to the Arctic than to life in the cities.

Back from all that happens when you go: those rapid intense changes to the self that happen when you're focused in and there's no outwards distractions to keep you from mortal spelunking. From being dislocated at least once into a shards of what you once believed, given permission to fall apart on the lawn and take several days to stitch yourself back together, a kind of reconfiguration that honors the old pattern of self without duplicating it, or its mistakes. From the annual hard work of camping with others that takes its toll on your strength and energy: having fun at such a high intensity is as tiring as having a meltdown, because living life at such high intensity for more than a week is always exhausting, and requires time to process. From sleeping in utter dark and silence, with a loon calling occasionally from the neighboring lake. From getting out of the tent in the middle of the night for a moment, to witness the Milky Way covering half the sky, foreground veiled by the tall silhouettes of cedars and white pine. From starlight bright enough to see to be able to walk the trail. From the long glare of a close meteor, so bright it leaves a long tail behind it, so close the fireball at its head is green-white with the light from distressed burning ions. From where a bachelor wolf came into the cabin clearing the other day, a little bit lost and curious. From dipping naked into the Temperance River, and Hare Lake, and showering outdoors under water hand-pumped cold from the well and heated in 55 gallon oil drums over a small fire to run down the hill through hoses and valves and emerge as liquid ecstasy.

And I'm not back.

Part of me always wants to linger, after returning from a week's camping, or a roadtrip, or a photo travel expedition, or just going to visit someone Elsewhere. I'm always reluctant to dive back into the virtual world of Connexion, be it online, via phone, or even just to let the neighbors notice you're back. Of course they will, anyway, when on a steambath morning in August you're unloading the truck, shirtless, and piling clothes and blankets for laundry, washing the road dust off the windows, and opening the tent to air and dry it out. The tent lies on the lawn on its back like a satellite dish or an upturned beetle kicking the air, helpless and cleaned out. It's a downtown market morning but do you really want to do the work of getting dressed and going out.

You want to linger in the silence that you slept in, comfortably, for the past week. You get no better sleep than sleeping outdoors in a tent, in utter silence and darkness. Sometimes very strong dreams emerge from it. Time has shifted; nothing ever seems quite as urgent as it did before leaving. Reluctance to re-engage with the high speed traffic of email and Connexion from everywhere via cyberspace, that feather-light non-touch that means nothing to the body. Even reading books in the morning, the usual morning practice, shifts away from deep thought towards deeper thoughts in fiction or poetry, those truths that can tell deeper human truths because they cloak them as lies.

You want to take a few more days to return, to gear up to speed slowly and gently, not grinding your gears, not pushing or being pushed faster than inner quiet requires. To spend at least a day doing nothing but laundry and silent integration before you take up all those other conversations that Connexion requires.

And eventually get back into the pace of everyday life. But maybe slowed down a little. Maybe a little more thoughtful than before. Maybe with a slight sideways look at what people take for granted, don't think about much, a look with a little suspicion that it doesn't have to be that way, that it could maybe be better, or at least different. A little detachment brought back from No Place Between, to protect you from the vice of egoism, the sin of pointless drama, the sadomasochism of everyday life. A bit of perspective, no judgment on it, a bit of detachment, learned from Elsewhere, and those gods that walk there, reminding you that whatever you think you need to live, there's Something More than this.