Travis Hedge Coke
There Is Nothing Left to Say On The Invisibles
5.02
Off Queer
by Travis Hedge Coke
“That would make you a lesbian. Lucky you.”
Lord Fanny seems genuinely happy both for Boy and Jack Frost to be dating and that Jack, who was homophobic, transphobic, sexist, touch-paranoid, and a bit sex-is-control and sex-is-violence as a kid.
Fanny saw Jack kick bad habits.
Stop bad rhetoric and examine his own fears.
And, as an all-pronouns mercurial nonbinary queer, Fanny is bright with Jack when she suggests he is – thought they would not phrase it that when, then – a he/him lesbian.
There are politics in all our pronouns. You know. You you, you.
It may be an issue with you, that Lord Fanny is never conclusively female nor male, even after using one set of pronouns or being identified as such by someone else. Even, if Fanny makes the declaration herself, he can shift it a moment later.
Much of the description of a lesbian dialectic around sapphic media representation, in Lee Ann Roripaugh and Susan J Wolf’s The (in)visible lesbian, applies well to the shape of The Invisibles: “highly ambivalent and hotly debated responses;” “a consistent sense of anxiety;” “foregrounded as slippery.”
Like sexuality and representation, The Invisibles is something we have to live – not only to live in or live with; to live – a bohemian holomotion and the unbroken, unending whole.
The Invisibles is awkwardly less queer than it could be and probably the queerest thing DC Comics was publishing during its entire original serialization. A lot of the straightness in The Invisibles seems straight-presenting, and even more only presenting since Morrison officially came out in 2020.
Those come outs can seem de facto, but at least we no longer have to say “cis-seeming” or “nominally straight.”
Fanny and Mob are fairy godmothers. Beryl and Edie, faerie queenes. Robin, the nerdiest boy in school. Sir Miles, a married man.
Beating up on Grant Morrison comics had become almost a queer rite of passage by the time The Invisibles put out its final issues. They were never queer enough, while always being really queer. New X-Men, Sea Guy, Klaus, and what followed The Invisibles was really queer/not queer. They were “gay-coded,” or “straight-gay.” Fetish. Fetish was a big accusation, often by the same people who believe when Morrison would invoke drag acts, from Danny La Rue to Hinge and Bracket, that they are invoking them with disdain.
What did we expect? What do we expect now? Can we be satisfied?
We were fickle, but who ain’t?
And, too, what means, straight?
Fanny is politically a woman, socially nonbinary, and primarily interested in sexual relations with men. Is Fanny straight? Het?
I find myself frequently in trouble, for my definition of straight, but I cannot relinquish it, even if it is outdated. As straight comes, increasingly, to be synonymous with heterosexual, I find myself selfishly disinterested in the reduction.
For me, a trans person who is heterosexual is still not straight. But, for me, when someone kicks a drug habit, or a hobby, they get straight. You put on your asking-for-a-loan clothes to visit the bank; that is straight. “Getting straight” is avoiding anything an HOA might hold over your head that is not straight racism.
Bobby Goldsboro, Glen Campbell, Bing Crosby and me have all sung the Sonny Curtis lines, “Having a ball on a couple ‘a bob/Treating the ladies to corn on the cob/Leaving the straight life behind.”
At least twenty women sang on Sally Go ‘round the Roses; ain’t one of us knows if that is a gay song or if it is not.
Straightness is heteronormativity and heteronormativity is an affectation.
While it may grind the gears of some, we still see older people buck against being called cis not because they are especially opposed to a differentiation between cisgender and transgender, but because they do not feel cisgender or, “cisnormative.” And, that is alright. I am unprepared to tell someone who does not feel cis that they are. They can be something else.
Being annoyed or distressed with this looseness of definition is also valid.
Another gnostic mistake, is that the koinos kosmos & idios kosmos are distinct. That symmetries imply or ensure dualities. That idios is dream and koinos consensus. That our consensus does not extend into dream or fantasizing, that our individuation is not present in group dynamics and group mutability. We are are particle and wave.
In 1920 St. George Fox-Pitt has to pay £500, to Radclyffe Hall, for slander, after he accused her of engaging in undomestic perversion with Lady Troubridge & a ghost, but when it came into court & record, couldn’t admit he knew what lesbians were.
In the 1920s, King Mob and Edith Manning have sex while he is a ghost and much later while he is not. Pair of by and bye bis.
The scores of predilection are countenanced, uncountable. The doors of perception are a grain elevator of deflection. Especially, maybe, in the nervousness of sexual identity in the mirror.
Being annoyed or distressed with this looseness of definition is also valid.
It is not whether or not someone is a woman or man that hurts anybody, but the arguments around why that is so all-fire important. The significance of binaries and the aggressive defense and fence-riding for them.
Some people will ride fence for heteronormativity, pinning the barbed wire back to posts and policing who or what crosses over like it is their life’s vocation, and for some it is.
I have to hedge my bets, sometimes, and say, “nominally cishet,” or “presumably straight,” because fictional characters, living people, the dead, the past, the future, the present do not give up all their truth in every facet at all times. And, certainly not specifically to me.
It is rude to call a real person an uncracked egg or a closeted queer publicly. At the least. In some cases, you are simply inviting upon them violence. In fictive characters, we have more freedom. They can weather violence, especially from our ontic sphere, separate from theirs by ideation.
Fanny travels with a nurse uniform. That is identity.
I have always known I was queer and I have never felt a need to limit what queer is. If you could box it in, it would still be queer; your box would be junk.
Yet, I am uptight. Discussing new genital surgeries with my doctor, she called it bottom surgery. I said, it’s not. “I’ve dealt with bottom surgeries before.” I defer to the doctor. The white coat of the midwife, right?
A nurse is excited any time I visit. Is she like this with all her patients? She calls me a trans elder. She is a kid and I am Fox Mulder’s address, Jackie Robinson, the answer to life, the universe, and ten cards short of a full deck, no jokers.
Closeted Boy. Lesbian Jack. Both with some touch and queerphobia to work through. Heterosexual Fanny. Bi lesbian Roger. Bi Mob.
The tarot card, The Lovers, is so often used cheekily to represent not lovers, but a gender binary. Hahaha. Are not we cute? Men and women! The Invisibles features a wonderful détournement, simply in acknowledging that the phrase, “someone’s going to get fucked,” can go a myriad of ways, and the cover of Volume Three which evokes The Lovers emphasizes a focus beyond the apparent binary, like sliding between the loves, into Death and through Death into Judgment. 5. 9. 20.
Little Richard dies on March 9, 2020. May 9, 1920, Richard Adams, who wrote Watership Down, is born. A little different, it would have been, Martin Pasko and Tom of Finland.
Overuse performative to mean performance, kill performance. Overuse political to mean performative, devalue politic. Conscious and conscientious are (not) the same. Staggering. In variables. Of levels. In legalese. Make light. Be lighting. Sparking. Snagging. Make whoopee. Hooking. Make up. Make let. Be lit.
Between The Lovers and through Death.
Off-queer sounds more than it might be. Like the names of tarot cards or what we call Bible stories, the answer to everything, the magick of multiplication, the 42nd rule in the prologue of the Snark, the fragmentary canards that would make you a lesbian. Lucky you.
*******
Nothing in There is Nothing Left to Say (On The Invisibles) is guaranteed factually correct, in part or in toto, nor aroused or recommended as ethically or metaphysically sound, and the same is true of the following recommendations we hope will nonetheless be illuminating to you, our most discriminating audience.
Ghostworld. Crisosto Apache. 2022.
My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness. Nagata Kabi. 2016.
Bend It Like Beckham. Gurinder Chadha. 2002.
Empty Glass. Pete Townshend. 1980.
