Outstretched Hands Have Good bones

queer girlhood and playground games

There is this game we used to play at recess where we tried to read each other's minds. The premise is simple: hold out both of your hands - palms up - and I’ll slap them with mine. Which one stings the most? Give me that hand, and I’ll brush the tips of my fingers along each of yours. Tell me which one tickled the most. Let me pinch each pad of that finger, and tell me which one hurt the most. That small section, less than a square inch of skin, is the window to the mind and soul, at least as far as grade-school clairvoyants are concerned. Now, close your eyes and listen carefully: picture a circle, square, or triangle. I mean really picture it. Squeeze your eyes shut tight, and think of nothing else, otherwise this won’t work. If you focus hard enough, I’ll see that shape on the pad of your finger. 

Circles, squares, triangles: I still swear they blossomed in our hands like childhood stigmatas. 

In grade school I was soft spoken and high strung, easily startled and quick to embarrassment. For me, it was always the tip of my right middle finger, and they could always see straight through me. Shapes rose to my surface with the same ferocity that blood rose to my cheeks when someone grabbed my hand. Each time the girl peering intensely at my palm - her careful fingertips steadying my own - correctly guessed the shape I was conjuring behind my eyelids, a jolt shot through my stomach. If you can see a small, white triangle rise to the surface of my fingertips, what else can you see? What other secrets are being betrayed by my outstretched hands? 

This was sixth grade, the year that my friends started wearing bras and dating boys, the year that I became acutely aware of the way I looked at other girls and stopped giving my friends long hugs. During this time, I needed so badly for someone to see me clearly, but I felt foggy and unstructured - a shape floating momentarily to the surface of a ruddy palm. I could not force myself into a form that I understood, or even wanted to be, but this was when I began trying. 

Stereotypically, women are allowed a degree of physical intimacy with their friends that men are often denied; women cuddle with their friends on the couch and change in front of one another and hold hands. This freedom operates under the assumption that in the absence of men, women are free of the male gaze and thus free of hypersexualization. Girls kiss their friends' cheeks and sit on each other's laps. Queer girlhood can rob us of that intimacy, even from the closet. As soon as we become old enough to realize that there is something different about the way we view intimacy with women, we become apprehensive of intimacy as a whole. One of my closest childhood friends and I would never hug hello or goodbye, but we once kissed each other while drunk only to laugh it off in the morning. 

For lesbians, and queer people who were socialized as women, our relationship to  our own sexuality is often tainted with reminders of objectification. In her novel The Robber Bride Margaret Atwood describes the ever present male-gaze when she writes, “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” This quote captures how it feels to move through the world as a person taught to perform for the male gaze, but it takes on an especially prevalent meaning for queer women; not only is our self perception subconsciously influenced by the male gaze, but our relationship to our own sexuality is often tainted by reminders of hypersexualization and objectification. This experience is revealed through our earliest experiences with attraction, our friendships with straight men, and through our queer platonic relationships. 

For queer people who are socialized as girls, our awareness of our attraction to women often coincides with our first experiences of objectification, making it difficult to divorce innocent feelings of attraction from fear and shame. Queer girlhood involves learning of objectification from both ends of the spectrum; when you begin to acknowledge your own attraction to women in the same year that you are cat-called for the first time or told to cover up around men, queer girlhood can feel like abetting the oppressor.

Navigating friendships with straight men as queer women also oftentimes places us within an odd dichotomy. I recall being freshly out of the closet and working a shift at a restaurant job, when one of my coworkers ran into the kitchen. 

“Look at that girl in line,” he insisted. “Check out how hot she is.”

I peaked around the corner and, sure enough, the girl waiting in line was, in fact, hot. My coworker continued to unpack her attractiveness to me in increasingly uncomfortable detail as I washed dishes, before eventually attempting to get her number while ringing up her order. This interaction nagged at me because it was strangely validating. At the time, I felt that this coworker had acknowledged my sexuality as if on equal footing with his; we both found this woman attractive. There was an odd feeling of freedom that accompanied engaging with the male gaze without being a target of it, to be on the other end of Atwood’s keyhole of voyeurism, or at least to pretend that I was. This was my first introduction into the Catch-22 that I continuously find myself walking with straight men; I want to have my sexuality validated, to be interacted with as a platonic friend as opposed to an object of attraction, but it seems that this is often accomplished through participating in the objectification of other woman, as if the only way to rid myself of the pressure of the male gaze is to direct it at another woman. 

It was not until a few years later, after I found a community of other queer people, that I truly began to feel comfortable in both my sexuality and my platonic relationships. When it comes to openly queer friendships, there is no lingering feeling of secrecy or guilt like I have experienced in previous friendships; changing in front of one another, hugging, sharing blankets during movie nights, all of these small gestures of intimacy are unaccompanied by a paranoia of being outed or viewed as predatory. Other queer women understand the strange barriers to platonic intimacy that growing up closeted can foster, and together we help one another break down these walls. Furthermore, we are able to talk about our love lives, about people we find attractive, about sex and intimacy, in an honest way that is not only cathartic, but fun.

Although our own experiences with queerness and coming out are distinct, our shared history of queer girlhood provides us with a common thread. We all understand the feeling of looking down at our outstretched hands in fear, needing to be seen but hoping to blend in.

I still swear, even now, that I have seen perfect triangles appear on the pads of fingers, and watched their shape fade once that silly game ended. I know this game is just that. A game. Realistically, the trick is that 33% of the time you inevitably guess the correct shape. The other 67% of the time something was just lost in translation.

Wait, I think I picked the wrong hand, the wrong finger. I thought you said diamond, not triangle. I guess that circle kind of did look like a square, I can see the edges forming. 

When both the psychic and the subject want to believe in the reading, its accuracy means very little. As a young girl who was so afraid of vulnerability, so unable to articulate her uncharted feelings, I wanted intimacy to be that easy. I wanted to be able to peer into someone’s mind with a few squeezes of the hands, and I wanted to be able to open up to someone else under the same pressure. Yet, for much of my adolescence I harbored an unshakable suspicion that I did not know how to be truly close to someone, simply because I already felt that I had so much to hide. What a relief it is to grow up, to discover that the world extends far beyond the boundaries of your elementary school playground, and to then find your place in it, to find your people in it.

The game may be just that - a game - but it does make sense. Show me the intersection of your pain, your joy, your discomfort. That is where you bare your soul if you’ll just allow yourself to, and if you find someone willing to look close enough. Even as kids huddled beneath a yellow slide, clammy hands outstretched as if receiving communion, we understand something that we will soon begin to deny: we want so badly to be vulnerable, to be heard without speaking. We want to touch each other's hands, to look reverently at each other and truly see something, even if it is only a few blurry shapes.

My friendships with queer women have taught me how to be kind, nurturing, and accepting. Queer people have taught me how to love.