Summers - Pregnant butch: nine long months spent in drag: a graphic memoir

Copyright A.K. Summers 2014 All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available ISBN 978-1-61902-367-3 Cover design by Debbie Berne SOFT SKULL PRESS An imprint of COUNTERPOINT 1919 Fifth Street Berkeley, CA 94710 www.softskull.com Distributed by Publishers Group West 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS There is a certain alchemical magic that happens when a memoir about a very specific and unusual type of experience is particularly well crafted. It sheds light on a reality outside of most readers experience, but it also, in seeming contradiction, has a profound universality. A.K. A.K.

Summers illustrates in creative, clever, and exhaustive detail the singular story of her pregnancy as a butch dyke, but the issues raised by this particular experience resonate for anyone who has thought about gender, sexual identity, pregnancy, birth, bodily transformation, or the presentation of self, among other topics. In short, any thinking person will find something in this book that speaks directly to her or him. This graphic novel demonstrates precisely why we still need a vibrant LGBTQ cartooning underground. In the not-so-distant past, the mainstream steered clear of any queer content, so any comic with a queer character was necessarily a queer comic. Now, in the days of lesbian superheroes and gay Archie characters, it is the job of the mainstream to normalize and assimilate queer characters into the overall fabric of their stories, but it remains the job of the LGBTQ comics underground to celebrate, analyze, and shed light on the profound complexities of queer experiences from an insiders perspective. The new lesbian Batwoman (who has only ever been written by men) is never going to get pregnant with a syringe, get excited about wearing suspenders, worry about the availability of regular pee stops, fantasize about queer birthing classes doing improbable body pyramids, hope for a bus-driver midwife, and second-guess her third-trimester sex life.

That project is, thankfully, up to A.K. Summers, a real, honest-to-goodness butch dyke who lived through the experience, and shares it with us in this delightful, surprising, informative, suspenseful, and hilarious graphic novel memoir. Through the alchemical magic of excellent cartooning, she has made her distinctive experience relatable for everyone, leaving us all feeling a little more pregnant and a little more butch. Justin Hall San Francisco, 2013 Its been ten years since I was a pregnant butch. I got the idea to draw a comic about it when my son was two. I remember talking about it for the first time while visiting friends in upstate New York.

My girlfriend and I were letting our toddler run around without pants, with predictable results for our friends newly painted porch. At the time I thought doing the comic would be a lark. Just a short comic zine about my most ironic experiences as a P.B.a mere poo on the porch. But Pregnant Butch exited its mere poo stage fairly rapidly. It became more of a story and less a set of cultural observations. Its pastiched Tintin elements mostly fell away.

It got longer. It got heavier. It acquired all the ponderousness of any third-trimester endeavor. Then, seven years after conception, Pregnant Butch finally emerged in its nearly present form as a serial on webcomics site ACT-I-VATE, where it ran over the course of another year. There is something profoundly disconcerting about reliving a pregnancy for eight years. I have often felt self-conscious talking about the project, admitting that yes, I am still working on a comic about those same nine months.

For a while, it didnt occur to me that time works differently for books, that Pregnant Butch could continue to speak to readers regardless of how long ago my pregnancy had taken place. That Pregnant Butch could still be experienced in the present tense was demonstrated to me about midway through P.B.s online serialization. I had just posted a page about the lack of public restrooms in NYC, ending with the demand that the mayor do something to address a vital civic need for pissoirs. My editor at ACT-I-VATE made a sympathetic online comment,... with baby changing facilities! Later in an email exchange he alluded to the difficulties of finding time to work when one has a small baby. Oh, I realized.

He thinks Ive got one of those. When I confessed to him that my small baby was nine years old, he laughed and replied that... so was his. But in the last ten years, some other things have changedand changed enoughto crack that eternally pregnant present. Namely, public attitudes toward homosexuals and transpeople have undergone a major shift. There is simply no mistaking 2003 for 2013.

Despite its diaristic immediacy, Pregnant Butch clearly depicts another moment in time. Some indications of this show up in factual differences: Twelve states now allow gay marriage. No one argues passionately for the separate-but-equal-style civil union laws anymore. The president has evolved in his views on gays. Dont Ask, Dont Tell has been repealed. The Supreme Court has ruled that sodomy laws are unconstitutional and overturned the Defense of Marriage Act.

Even the ex-gay movement is getting a clue: Exodus International recently disbanded, after thirty-seven years of trying to repair gays and lesbians. Some other shifts are generational: though I still identify as butch, it is a term no longer much in use by young queers. The reasons that butch has been discarded fall outside the scope of this introduction, though I will admit that in some ways the abandonment of the term seems superficial to me, having mostly to do with the fun of coming up with new ways to say bulldagger. (I mean, seriously, boi?) More substantive are the arguments in which female masculinity has been reframed as a transgender issue, rather than a sexual one. Butch will perhaps forever be associated with butch-femme, a particular sexual culture and dynamic. If you are a masculine person who sees yourself first and foremost as trans, then butch as a descriptor is not going to do it for you.

Identifying as butch marks me as squarely in my middle age and as invested in a sexual culture which is less common than it used to be. This is all just to say that different generations of pregnant masculine people will respond to the butch label as more or less relevant to them. Lastly, some of the dissonant aspects of P.B. may be attitudinal: why does the tone of P.B. seem so negative? I was asked by one editor. Where is the balance? Would I consider adding some counteractive moments of joy, such as (his suggestion) the first time I felt the baby kick? Oof. Hackneyed tropes of pregnancy aside, I think the guy was responding to the present-day context of 2013 as much as to the story.

With all the celebratory noise about gay marriage and the enormous shift in public attitudes that made it possible, how could he not read Pregnant Butch as inexplicably negative? (Well, perhaps if hed gone through a pregnancy himself...) When I conceived of P.B., it seemed important to me to get the experience down because I felt alone in it. I knew other butches were doing it but I wasnt hearing their storiesat least not in the raw, personal argot that I was hankering for. Come on! I want to hear the negative! The dirt! The account you hear over a beer at the end of the night. So I wrote P.B. to address this lack of gender-challenged confinement talesand to add to the stories of pregnancy that acknowledge the real pain of dislocation many feel and are discouraged from describing. O.K., and also to draw myself as Tintin. As such,