have never regretted being a lesbian: you get to wear comfortable shoes, you can spend the money you save on birth control on Indigo Girls and Tracy Chapman CDs, and you don't have to waste valuable time looking for a caring, enlightened man. But this is not to say there are not drawbacks to being a lesbian. You might think I'm referring to not necessarily getting protection under the law against discrimination or being forbidden from marrying the woman you love. But sometimes it's the smaller stuff of daily life that plagues you—like where do you put your stuff? Some lesbians do, of course, carry purses, but to me, a purse is something in which you put your makeup, perfume, and spare panty hose—none of which have touched my skin in a decade or more. In addition, figuring out what kind of purse "goes with" drawstring shorts, a pocket tee, and battered cross-training shoes is tantamount to getting Arafat and Barak to cuddle: it's simply beyond my imagination.
When I did carry a purse, back in high school, it looked like I might have wrestled a nun for it. And, of course, I did have only one purse, since accessories, to me, meant something more like socks or books. Also, I was never very comfortable with carrying a purse. I suspect I looked more like a Marine shouldering an automatic weapon than a young ingenue. Perhaps if my mother had had the foresight to pay for purse-carrying lessons for me from a femme, this whole ugly mess of where to put my stuff could have been avoided. As it stands, the dilemma of where to put my things —keys, wallet, sunglasses, Kleenex, herbal allergy pills, and scraps of paper with snippets of poems I'm writing —has tormented me.
In college, the backpack was a year-round godsend. Even now, in the winter, it's not too much of a struggle since my coats tend to have a generous selection of pockets. But when the warmer weather hits, a lot of crap threatens to end up in my pants pockets, causing me to risk looking like someone in desperate need of a Thighmaster—a situation I try to avoid. But the question is, How do I avoid it?
Since I now seem to feel the need to be prepared for an economic or health crisis striking at any moment, the logistics are not simple. For awhile, the fanny pack ( a.k.a., the lesbian purse ) came to the rescue. But as my gal Kathy has pointed out, no one looks good wearing a fanny pack. You end up looking either like your goiter slipped south or like you lost the skirt that goes over your bustle. So we quietly put the fanny pack away with the wide-lapel shirts and hip-hugger pants and other fashion mistakes we've made over the years. Then we toyed with getting one of those tiny little backpacks that were so popular, but dismissed the possibility of wearing one as akin to wearing a Little Mermaid or Hansons' t-shirt.
I do have, for fancy dress occasions, what I refer to as my wallet-on-a-string: a nice black leather receptacle on a long strap that will hold some credit cards, money, a pen, a pair of glasses, and, if I plan carefully, some Kleenex, a key or two, and a few pills. But what you need to know is that Kathy and I generally cohabit a purselike receptacle, and the wallet-on-a-string barely accommodates one person's stuff.
You might think having two people on the case would make finding the right receptacle easier. Or you might think a shared bag is just plain weird: the height of codependence; it's certainly not an arrangement most heterosexual women have. Either way, finding a suitable carrier has not been easy. We eventually settled on a canvas camera bag. "Kath," her mom and sister have warned, "that's looking dangerously close to a purse." And in fact, we call it "the butch purse," or the "b.p.," for short.
And while this whole discussion has been political, if you believe the old axiom that "the personal is political," here's where the real politics come into play: Who carries the butch purse? Ideally, it's a responsibility we should share equally. But in reality, it is Kathy who generally shoulders both the responsibility—and the butch purse. It's not because she's the boss of this relationship. ( Though she is. ) It's that she insists that, for safety reasons, the strap of the b.p. be worn over the head. And to be honest, I feel that I look dorky enough on my own, most days, without having a canvas strap bisecting my boobs like a really rugged cross-your-heart bra. Since Kathy is less vain than I am, she therefore usually carries the b.p.—which, in addition to the items I've already mentioned, has been known to carry examples of hardware that need replacing, the coupon caddie, a special dark chocolate bar for snacking at the movies, and poop bags for the dogs. We were, after all, both Girl Scouts.
And on those rare occasions when Kathy puts her foot down and makes me carry the butch purse? I look about as relaxed as a father carrying a diaper bag. Tinky-Winky I am not.
Zipter can be reached via email at yxz@press.uchicago.edu . c 2000 by Yvonne Zipter.
