Katie Gilmartin, Printmaker

Ball

Bears

Bottom

Breeder

Bye Bi

Closet

Cruising

Dish

Dyke

Dykons

F to M

Faerie

Fag

Friends of Dorothy

Michigan

Milk

Packing

Pearl Diving

Queen

Sisters

Stonewall

Tearoom

Top

TV

Two Spirits

Village People

Watersports

 

An Introduction to Queer Words
by Katie Gilmartin

When I titled this collection “Queer” words, I meant it in both senses of the term: these are words used in queer communities, and in many cases they are also words that are odd, strange, bent in some way. Several (dyke, fag, faerie) remain venomous epithets in some contexts, while simultaneously functioning as fiercely chosen and hard-won terms of pride. To the extent that they become the latter, their power to function as the former diminishes: in this sense they have, quite literally, been bent to serve our purposes. I’m remembering an apocryphal story about two women walking hand-in-hand down the street when someone yelled at them, “Ya dirty dykes!” One of the women spun around and angrily shouted, “Hey! Who you calling dirty!?”

I’ve exhibited the prints in a variety of contexts, and learned a lot about our queer communities in the process. At one show a gay man asked what the U-Haul was doing behind the dyke -- whether it was a reference to diesel dykes who walk like truck drivers. I hadn’t thought of that, but it made perfect sense, which made me chuckle. And I told him about an old joke that spoofs the tendency of lesbians to immerse themselves quickly in intense relationships: What does a lesbian bring on a second date? The answer: A U-Haul. I was then delighted to learn that there’s a gay version of that riddle: What does a gay man bring on a second date? What second date?

While working on “Tea Room” a friend told me about the importance of such cruising sites in his coming-out process. As a teenager he’d snuck into a few gay bars, but hadn’t yet found a community within queerdom that felt like home to him. Then he noticed this scrawled on the walls of a public bathroom: “Wednesday nights, 8 pm.” He returned at eight on a Wednesday and found not only hot sex, but another teen who told him about a gay bookstore in downtown Atlanta. My friend made his way to the bookstore where a friendly clerk, seeing something in his style and demeanor, recommended he check out the radical faeries, who, it turned out, had a sanctuary not so far away. Thus my friend found his way to a community that’s been his spiritual home for many years. As he was telling me the story, I vividly recalled signposts that functioned similarly in my own life. When I began having inklings of my erotic attractions to women, I went to the nearest equivalent of a tearoom in my far-more-circumscribed world: the section of my college library devoted to lesbian literature. Inside the front cover of every book on these shelves was scrawled: “Dykes meet Wednesday nights, 8 pm, Room 208.”

Doing research for these prints was a perpetual delight. I’ve long had a particular fondness for the term “friends of Dorothy,” a phrase that appears to have emerged during World War II as a covert way of asking about another’s sexual preferences. It is unclear whether the term originated as a reference to Dorothy Parker or the Wizard of Oz, but in either case, “Are you a friend of Dorothy?” would sound perfectly innocuous to those not in the know, while providing the rest with an opportunity to recognize one other. It is such a gentle weapon of self-defense, it seems to me, that our predecessors crafted in response to extreme and legally sanctioned homophobia. My fondness for the term increased exponentially upon learning, from Randy Shilts, that it played a role in a Navel investigation of homosexuality in the Chicago area during the early 1980s. Upon learning that gay men frequently referred to themselves as “friends of Dorothy,” intrepid Naval investigators launched a massive hunt for this Dorothy, hoping to persuade her to reveal the names of the many gay service members she apparently counted among her friends. The Navy never did find her -- but as you and I know, even if they had: Dorothy would NEVER tell.

These prints poke fun at our various identities, play with stereotypes, allude to tensions between the many communities gathered under the umbrella “Queer,” and reference our historical and continued oppression as sexual and/or gender minorities. Only once did I receive a complaint about the barbed humor in the prints. I heard, second-hand, that a viewer was offended by my placement of the “Bi” trio sitting on a fence. In her view the print evoked the notion that bisexuality is an identity for folks who haven’t yet decided who they really are, implying that bisexuality isn’t a valid choice in and of itself. Indeed, the print does just that – though I hoped that the accompanying image of the trio merrily driving off in a car with an “Anything That Moves” bumper sticker would convey their flippant dismissal of those beliefs, their fence-sitting as a sassy act of empowered choice.

That this print occasioned pain rather than laughter testifies to the extent to which such stereotypes continues to hold sway, to harm, to divide. Only when we’ve digested a painful word or stereotype, embraced it to some degree, are we able to reclaim it – and in that process of reclamation diminish its potential for harm. I would like to think that this collection may, in a humble way, contribute to that process. But for some words, and in some communities, the identities are too hard won: the wounds too fresh to allow reclamation. So I ask you, gentle reader, for your gracious dispensation for touching any nerves that are too raw yet for humor. My intentions are certainly to skewer our precious identities, and I do so with deep respect and gratitude for the ongoing struggle to forge these identities and the communities they enable.

Our queer words are a record of creative resistance. I remember my first coming-out, as a lesbian, to parents raised with a 1950s understanding of sexuality and gender. While their love for me was paramount, the only life they could imagine for their dyke daughter was a twilight one: semi-employed, shunned by neighbors, I would spend my days confined to a dim basement apartment, my spirit, like my houseplants, grown wan and spindly from lack of light. Yet even in the harshest years for queerdom, arguably the 1950s, our communities found ways to resist, to celebrate ourselves, to flower. In A Restricted Country Joan Nestle tells of a dyke bar in fifties New York City that posted a guard at the bathroom door to enforce its harsh one-occupant-at-a-time policy, resulting in a perpetual queue that spiraled around the bar. As Nestle tells it, a line act developed in that spiral of queer bodies, a joking, cruising, strutting, boldly creative acting-out of proud butch and femme style: “We wove our freedoms, our culture, around their obstacles of hatred.” So many of our queer words were, similarly, forged of necessity in the harsh realities of homophobia. Whether retooled epithets, secret codes, or identities embodying alternative ways of being, each in some way carries the traces of our collective struggles. Our queer words are, in that sense, the flowers of our oppression, the fruits of our resistance. So consider this collection a bouquet – to our fabulousness.

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