Blog > Los Angeles > Sister Spit Schoolz LA in Gay

Sister Spit Schoolz LA in Gay

posted by chrisinlala on July 9, 2008

Tags: art, eileen myles, literature, los angeles, michelle tea, performance, queer, sister spit, west hollywood

As a self identified queer girl with my privileged women's studies education behind me, I am constantly surprised by the efforts of gay Angelino's to mimic straight culture. Gay geography is LA is somewhat limited to West Hollywood, land of lesbians who look like straight celebrities, who aren't expressing their sexuality anywhere else but at the bar.  Queer ideas of gender identity, sexual expression and social interactions expressed through aesthetics, personal intention and values have become harder to find here. Which is why I was beside myself to spend an evening in June listening to the writers of Sister Spit read their work at the Hammer Museum in West LA. The legendary touring company Sister Spit is a rotating crew of female novelists, performance artists, poets and the like who have been bringing queer art and lit to the stage since the 90's. To quote member Eileen Myles, "Sister Spit is a movement of brilliant losers."

Queer culture in la la Los Angeles consists of...um, well nothing...
In La La, you're more likely to see Tila dancing on the bar on Friday in West Hollywood than you are to find any diverse representations of gender and sex in lgbt spaces. But Tila Tequila is straight you say? Exactly.
We only do things in La La that can be packaged for cable. We have 'fierce' gay boys that make excellent stylists and lesbians that look like competitors on the latest season of the bachelor. Here, we are giant stereotypes of ourselves. Boys are still the effeminate comic relief they've been playing on screen for a century. Women are just now relaxing into our own palatable and empowered (?) on screen role as the lipstick lesbian. We look and act just as hetero-dominant culture asks us to.

That's what we do in LA, we export culture. We tell the world, through film and television, through media, how to dress, act, think, and be consumers of the dominant culture. Living here is like being in a constant reality show. We are always competing to be as beautiful, as thin, as tanned, as rich, as straight as the images we sell through movies and television. Here, the only way you can identify a lesbian is by who she sleeps with.  The other signifiers of queerness that arise when rules of sex and gender are tested are barely visible.

Listening to the members of Sister Spit read, I thought about the discursive evolution of the term 'queer'. I thought about Michelle Tea's mesmerizing description of the relationship between her hap hazard femme narrator and her FTM boyfriend with strong but delicate hands. I don't see these relationships here in LA. There is no room for play with gender here. Once upon a time we tried. But when The L Word solidified lesbianism as a marketing demographic, dykes got tired and moved to Brooklyn and I had to grow my shaved head out to find a job. What I miss specifically about queer culture is the act of appropriating gender binaries for the sake of their blurring. I miss the fact that maleness can be, and is, known within femaleness. Sister Spit reminded me that in some spaces, queer women are seeking the empowerment that we all seek as a society, that which occurs only when we reach past systems of duality, male-female, hetero-homo, white-of color, wealthy-poor.