Goodbye To Comics #6:
Lesbian = Woman Who Reads Comics? Part Two
The meta-narrative of this theoretical memoir is that I had a sexual accident with a "comic guy" and am in the hospital bleeding to death and unconscious. This is, as is everything in this memoir, theoretical, the same way that theoretically the US invaded Iraq for oil and theoretically Flight 93 was shot out of the sky in order to save thousands of lives. It’s all, as Steve Buscemi says in “Fargo,” “easy-peasy,” no reason for anyone to throw me headfirst into a wood-chipper.
When we last visited Lidsville I had just “outed” myself as a bisexual to my gay female co-worker at a comic company.
It was a crazy thing to do. It was the only thing to do. It was like being at the edge of a plank. It was like choking and needing oxygen.
But then what about my complaint last blog posting about the girls who called me a dyke at school just because I liked comics? Perhaps they were right?
It turned out that my co-worker also collected army dolls as a child, as well as the Six Million Dollar Man (a little before my time, but I had a lot of Return Of the Jedi figures). Was there a connection, then, gender-specific toys and sexual preference?
And was I truly bisexual? Or was it merely that I was a afraid of men?
After my sexual injury, Donovan Paul, the man who accidently broke my vagina, suggested that I might be gay because I was afraid of penetration -- and that perhaps the "silver lining" to the whole accident was the discovery of my true sexual persuasion. And that maybe he could watch.
But truth be told, whatever burgeoning bisexuality that had lived inside my psyche over the last 20 years was now giving me a great solution to my anxieties --
“No more penises.”
I was tired of dicks -- Donovan’s dick, Superman’s big honking theoretical dick, all dicks.
I was tired of dicks as well years earlier when I discussed “coming out” and other issues with my co-worker at a nearby bar.
“Is he still bothering you,” she asked me.
“Well...it’s just him being stupid. It’s not a big deal. I have a handle on it.”
“Maybe you should tell somebody.”
“And yeah, then I’ll get crucified.”
I had a handle on it, I reassured her. I had a handle on everything. I was going places. I was going to get my reward for dealing with dicks.
Weeks later, after going to a gay bar with my co-worker, after attending the Pride parade, I came out discretely to my bosses and co-workers. No longer did I find being called a “dyke” an epithet. I wanted to own who I was.
Besides, being gay didn’t hurt my co-worker -- everybody accepted her.
But she wasn’t hired for the same reasons I was.
I was hired as a defacto secretary. A freelancer once joked that I was given money “to sit there and look cute.”
And here I was pulling an Anne Heche.
Some guys thought it kind of cool me being bisexual, because now I could make out with other women in front of them. But I insisted that I had no interest in “bisexuality as a parlor trick for men.” Okay, so now I’m not even Anne Heche. I’m like Gertrude Stein or something. By denying men the pleasure of the sapphic fantasy, I’m a bitch. Useless.
Needless to say, when the topic of diversity in the Justice League was brought up, my suggestion of bringing back the gay Ice Maiden was disregarded.
“She’s dead,” said one editor. “The gay one is dead and retconned out of existence. The straight one is alive.”
