Elise Matthesen

August is my birthday month, and I often make a bit of a fuss over it. There's usually a big sale in my Etsy shop, with discounts that spike on my actual birthday (22 August) and again at the close of the month. There's also usually a big overstock in my Etsy shop waiting to be marked down, but this year is different. I've been trying to juggle a bunch of different things, all of them urgent, for the past howeverlong, and jokingly saying that I needed four of me to be able to keep up. One of the ones I haven't kept up with is getting enough actual workbench time until lately.

So this August Birthday Month sale will be a little different. I do have new pieces to put up, and it wouldn't be a Birthday Month without marking some things down, so for now I am going to try putting a new piece up and marking an old piece or two (or five) down. We will see how that goes. As usual, anyone who wants to have everything shipped together at the end of the month (and thereby to save shipping on the things that get marked down to ten dollars and so forth) can tell me "LET IT RIDE" and I will accumulate treasures for them until the end of the month. (I csn give you a code that will let you skip paying for shipping on anything for the rest of August; just tell me LET IT RIDE and request the code.) The Etsy shop, for those who might have either forgotten or successfully resisted temptation until now, is at https://www.etsy.com/shop/LionessElise

Something else I've mentioned here is my eBay sales of queer history, comics, model railroading things, odd sartorial treasures and so forth. I am lioness_online there, so named because I am an Old and that's what we were naming things back then when eBay was a smaller and simpler place. I'll be putting up comics next, along with the rest of the queer history, which has brought out a nice bunch of archivists to whom I am most grateful for their contributions to both clearing my house and keeping it. Here, have a link: https://www.ebay.com/usr/lioness_online

The third thing I have needed an extra me for is finishing the Kickstarter project. As soon as all systems are go, I get to make a happy announcement about what we're doing and who's doing it. The few of you still waiting for your backer rewards will, I hope, be pleased -- as well as the everybody of you who is waiting for the video work that is the whole point of the project. (Not as pleased as I will be to finally get it to you, though!)

The fourth thing I have needed an entire me, or possibly a me and a half, is very boring to everybody else but essential for our household, is wrangling paperwork and pensions and powers of attorney and payment arrangements for various and sundry things. I am by nature more of a grasshopper, and this ant hat fits oddly and so does the rest of the ant uniform, but somebody's got to ant, so I am anting as antfully as I can. (If you want to assist, spread the word on my Etsy sale or my eBay treasures. My deepest gratitude to everyone who does.)

Besides all that, I'm proceeding through various parts of the landscape of grief. My father died in January, twenty days after his diagnosis. In clearing out various bookshelves and boxes for eBay or other bestowal, I have found some of his correspondence telling me I am bringing dishonor upon him and my mother and admonishing me to stop, mend my ways, and return to God's Law, which strictly disallows me speaking publically in favor of homosexuality. (That one is going to one of the archives that have collections of my work.)

He had very nice penmanship.

Anyhow, the other thing I'm doing, as usual, is going through my stash of perfume oils (mostly Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, but also Haus of Gloi and Nocturne Alchemy, all from years ago) and enjoying the weird time-travel that scents can enable. Today's keeper is BPAL's O, which was one of the very first BPAL perfumes I fell in love with around 2004 or 2005. (If you are an ancient BPAL fan and are looking for some particular discontinued treasures, let me know if I should look in my Go-Away Box to see if I have some to swap or sell.)

OK, so to end today's ruminations, before I go put a thing up in the Etsy shop and mark a few other things down, here are my reactions to BPAL's O. It has some musk to it but also something curiously bakery-like. When I first tried it, it reminded me of some of the mornings working at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, that hotbed of baked goods and romance. I miss walking up from the campground back in the really old days, coming up past the cappucino stand and getting a Prince Orange, and whatever pastry was on offer. I don't remember the pastries as well as I do the Prince Orange, which were revivifying drinks indeed, cold and citrussy, good to have on one's way up to cast call where we gathered under Bobo's direction and heard the announcements of the day and sang a little bit to make sure we were awake.

So you've got the announcement of the day, above. And I have promised to sing a little bit for my Patreon people, to whom I owe a song about Oobleck in the Bathtub which is true and happened at a local convention some years back. (Oh, right, there is a Patreon. It's here: https://www.patreon.com/elisem It's mostly for dispensing writing prompts, getting Beads of the Month in the hands of people who want them, and telling true life adventure tales. Ergo, oobleck song.) I'm slipping backwards and forwards in time a little bit due to the powers of perfume, but I was already doing that because of sorting out all my papers and ephemera and reference material and comics and books, so it's fitting, I guess.

And so goes the first day of my Birthday Month. Your kindness in stopping by and reading my musings is much appreciated. How is the day going for you?

(This is an essay which was first posted on Twitter earlier today. I have reformatted from tweet-sized bites to actual paragraphs, added one clarifying word, corrected one misspelling and the names of two women I thank in the final paragraph, and fixed a punctuation bobble. Thank you for reading.)



I’m going to try explaining a thing. It’s a thing that involves a lot of people telling me that I don’t exist or that I am not what I say I am or what I think I am, so this is fraught territory.

Back when I came out forty-some years ago, there were plenty of people ready to tell me that bisexuals don’t exist. They said we were just closeted, straights experimenting, too cowardly to come out, or too frivolous and sex-obsessed to make a choice and settle down. They said our orientation was temporary, not really anywhere people could stay and make a home.

It made bisexuality sound like a bus station, with everybody heading for some other realer place. And some people did actually say they were bisexual when they were afraid to come out as gay, and then they later assumed that all bisexuals must be like they were, and became huge biphobes with extra sanctimony sauce on top.

Back then, I particularly resented those people who said that bisexuals had no integrity, when the truth was that they themselves had no integrity while they were using our label as a disguise, or a shield, or a conveyance to get them from straight to gay.I felt like they had borrowed our apartment to use as a party house, left it strewn with beer bottles and vomit, and then kept talking about what a dump that place was and how obviously nobody would or could live there unless there was something wrong with them.

So for 40-some years I’ve gotten told that my sexuality didn’t really exist, or if it did, it was just temporary. Liminal. A doorway instead of a room. Something people pass through on their way to somewhere else, a real place, a legitimate place, a place that exists properly.

I got told this by Gay & Lesbian Community Action Council services when I called in crisis. The answer was basically “we don’t have anything for you; call back when you get a real orientation.”

I think of that call when I pass the street where that phone booth was. That was one of several points in my life where I almost didn’t make it through. It’s probably really lucky that I got angry instead, and decided that I was going to live and thrive, if only to spite those people on the other end of the phone.

Sometimes anger helps. Sometimes anger will give you enough traction to make it through whatever lousy situation you’re in, whether that situation involves self-harm or other people telling you that you don’t exist.

Anger often has some collateral damage, though. It’s usually not a precision tool.

Anyway, I came out as bisexual 40-some years ago, and these days people telling me I don’t exist are more likely to get laughed at than yelled at, but they’re still at it, some of them. People who say my sexuality is a liminal state, something (real) people pass through. A phase.

I only came out as non-binary within the last decade. I knew since I was a little kid that I was something other than what people told me I was, but I had no words for it. “Genderqueer” and “non-binary” only made it to my vocabulary recently. I’m still figuring out my words. But pretty much immediately I discovered there were people ready to tell me I didn’t exist again. That my gender was, at best, a liminal state. Something real people pass through on their way to legitimate destinations, real places.

I also found out I could still get angry. And the anger was stronger for there having been so many years when I did not have words that even remotely described my gender, the me-ness that I lived inside, and - yes - sometimes hid for my own safety.

And sometimes that anger still has collateral damage. When I read something suggesting my gender is one of the liminal ones, something people pass through on their way to someplace else, I still flash on those moments in the phone booth, being told the helpline was not for me. Being told that they were only interested in saving the lives of genuinely gay or lesbian people. Being told they didn’t have time to waste on me, goodbye.

It really is kind of a wonder that I’m here, now, so many years later.

So I don’t know whether somebody saying my gender is liminal or transitional or temporary or fake or whatever is a micro-aggression or what. Denying my existence feels a little bigger than micro, but whatevs.

And I can’t promise not to get angry about it.

Actually, at this point I probably can promise that I WILL get angry.

But I do also promise to work to try to limit some of the collateral damage when I express that anger. Even though I am so, so tired. But I am going to try to point my anger at the things being expressed, and not at the people expressing them.

Can’t promise I won’t mess up. I probably will. But it’s exercise I’ve decided is worth me trying.

Just... please know, if only for the length of time reading these tweets, that my anger (and sometime fear and sometimes despair) at being told I’m temporary is partly because I almost WAS temporary, and I am not going back to feeling that way again.

And sometimes I am going to react very badly to a piece of writing or other art because it gets into that territory for me.

Doesn’t mean it’s bad art. It might be great art. But my relationship with it will probably be complicated and rather intense. And this is one of the reasons why I don’t review books any more.

What does this all boil down to? Maybe… ask me what I think of the whole thing 40 years from now? Dunno if I’ll make it that far, but I might.

These days I’m all about not being temporary.

— finis —



P.S. Part of the reason I am still here is because of the encouragement and kindness of Rachel Pollack and Roz Kaveney among other excellent women. Love to you all, and thanks. 💕