I ain't no artiste.

[charlz_lynn]

Okay, here it is. It's not the greatest, but I wrote it in an hour and did my presentation an hour later. They loved it. And a guy in my class came up to me afterward and told me about his moms. It was great to talk to another kid of queers. I've always been a little shocked when he speaks by his sense of awareness, and I guess I understand now why. Not that all kids of queers are, but... 

It feels a little silly, like "yeah, yeah," but it was in response to a person in my class stating that I should not "throw that word around."
Anyway, text under the cut, and here's a photo of my li'l drawring.

Dyke is not a Dirty Word

brandiy lynn welch

The first time the word Dyke was screamed in my face I was nine years old. I was feeling pretty good before I got to my classroom, then the whole room fell silent and Logan Swerengen came over to me. The bell was about to ring and my fourth grade class had just learned that my mom was gay from a girl who had been at my birthday party. Logan took it upon himself to let me know how everyone felt about it. His face was inches away from mine as he drew a huge breath and shouted the word, spraying drops of spit onto my glasses and causing everyone in the room to burst into laughter and jeers. My heart broke.  

I had kept this secret from my new classmates for over a year. No one at my last school believed me when I told them my mom’s wife was coming to pick me up, and arguing did no good to convince them. But there, at Catholic school, I was popular. No one could tell I was dirt poor, no one knew that I lived in a trailer or that my mom drove a used car (when it was running), or that every piece of clothing I had – including my uniform – had come from donation boxes or bags of hand-me-downs from my cousins. No one knew that most of the food in our trailer came in plain black and white packaging.

No, no one needed to know any of those things, and I didn’t realize how offensive any of these things could be until my first day of public school. Before, I was popular, kind of cute, and well-liked because I was smart, but here I was a fat dirty geek, and having the best grades in class was the worst possible offense. At least, I thought it was, until it came out that my mom was gay.

From that day forward, I had to fight. I had already found the perfect place to hide and smoke cigarettes during recess, but now people followed me home from school, shoving me every few steps and hammering insults into my back. “So you’re mom’s a dyke, huh?” Shove. “That must mean you’re a dyke, too.” Shove. “That must mean you do it with each other.” Shove. The same week I mastered fractions I learned that if I lost it and hit someone hard enough to knock them down they would stop pushing me.  I soon figured out that if I hit someone enough times and made horrible enough threats, they would leave me alone for good. Shortly after that, I learned that I was the only one on my side at school.

After an hour of enduring “Lezzielezzielezzielezzielezzie” being hissed at my back, I would give in and ask the kid behind me to leave me alone, only to be reprimanded and then sent to the office when I tried to explain. When my mom had to come to school to defend me, she was often met with homophobia from the staff, and I was terrified that I would be failed in my classes because of her sexuality. The other kids threatened to tell the teachers or the principal, assuring me that I would be held back or kicked out of school. No matter how little sense it made, I always lived in fear that they were right.

Before that day in fourth grade, Dyke was simply my mom and co-mom. Dyke was my Aunt Dale on my dad’s side and my Aunt Joan on my mom’s side. Dyke was every female adult in my life who I considered family by any means other than blood. After that day, the meaning of the word did not change, but the entire world around me did. I was violently forced to understand homophobia. I was shown or told every day that to be different in this way was not okay, and the thing is, the people ‘teaching’ me this were doing so with a word that was as common in my language as ‘woman’ or ‘man’ are to most.

Here’s the thing about the word Dyke: In definition, Dyke simply means woman who sleeps with another woman. When people use this word to try and insult homosexual women, they are using queer sexuality itself as an insult. Asking anyone to not use this word to identify herself or her community is like asking a woman not to call herself a woman because misogynist men use it to insult each other, or, to be fair, asking men to not use the word “man” because “mannish” is supposed to be an insult to women.

When successfully reclaiming language, the power of a word is taken from the oppressor and claimed by the oppressed. The last time the word Dyke was screamed at me, it was just like the last hundreds of times. It may have been from a moving vehicle, or from a teenager walking by me on the street. I may have looked at them, or pretended I didn’t hear. I may have shouted my answer, or simply said it to myself. I don’t remember the details because it’s happened so many damn times in my life, but I do know that my answer was the same answer I have every time. “Yeah? And?” The person in the car or on the sidewalk or up in that window or sitting behind me in class or following me home from school no longer has the power to hurt me with my own language. Dyke reminds me that I am powerful, strong, and it pushes me to remember that I am a part of something bigger -- a huge community of women who also recognize their strength and power, and who do not put venom in places it does not belong.