Dykette

by Jenny Fran Davis

She felt her muscles stiffen, her smile go slack. She was transforming into a cunt. A mean girl. It was like her hero Chris Kraus says in I Love Dick: “The only thing I can do is tell the dumb cunt’s tale.”

The only thing she could do was tell the dumb cunt’s tale. Wherever Sasha went—including this trip upstate, even—her alienness was key to her belonging. This was what it had always meant to her, being gay. Her whole life, she’d known how to weld herself into a viable alternative to the popular thing. She wasn’t a nice girl, but she wasn’t a mean girl, either. Someone had once told Sasha that she wasn’t hot enough to be this crazy. But that itself was an unfair construction—you didn’t have to be hot to be crazy; you had to be hot to be mean.

She felt instead profoundly lesbian, seen-by-butch, seen-as-femme. Maybe a better word for it was dykette, containing both the butch’s gaze and the femme’s stare—because, of course, they’re looking at each other. It’s not a stare from below, the lesbian stare, but a pure wanting, a desire whose direction is always in flux.

Sasha always assumed that she was under surveillance, that others were scrutinizing her, an eternal spotlight focused above her head. But of course, this wasn’t true. Actually, people barely noticed her.