“Five hundred twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes ….”
As a college-aged rural Midwesterner visiting New York for the first time, the cast of RENT transformed me with their songs and stories. With their iconic opening song, “Seasons of Love” invited me to measure my life less in work commitments, and more in love. I walked away knowing I wanted to be near queers in my life — though I wasn’t yet embodied enough in myself to say “I want to be queer.”
It took me another 15 years to compute my queerness, and 25+ to reckon my genderqueer expression. (Bookmarking the story of these calculations for another time!)
I want to share about my most recent June trip to New York City — which felt like my first truly queer and genderqueer visit to the Big Apple.
I have had a meandering queer thread throughout my New York visits, starting with that queer exposure to RENT, and including a taste of queer dharma expression while teaching about Buddhist social action with the Buddhist Peace Fellowship in my previous 2015 visit.
This recent trip was fundamentally different in the ways it centered queerness from the beginning.
I had considered a potential visit for months. A trip started to make sense that included joining in the June Brooklyn Pride March with the Brooklyn Zen Center’s Dharma Queer Trans Sangha. Queerness blossomed as I leaned into queer platonic communication skills in organizing a trip with my travel buddy, where we each spoke to our needs and desires for connected and solo times, rather than assuming that if we were travel buddies we would arrive and leave at the same time, stay in the same place, and do everything together. I felt a particular queer euphoria of our friend connection deepening with our mutual honesty and self-integrity.
Add a surprise trip to the clothing-optional queer Riis Beach to lust after all of queer NYC amidst a 100-degree heat wave — and the queerness of the trip felt over the top! It felt queer to receive this beach invite text from an Oakland friend who also happened to be visiting NYC on the way to other commitments. Queer to get myself across town learning the transit system like a pro. Queer to show up comfortably without a bathing suit, swimming in cold ocean water in my undies, and allowing often unexposed parts be gently air-kissed under the shade shelter. It was soaked in the bliss of this beach adventure that I turned to my friend and said in amazement, “this feels like my very first trip to New York City fully embodied as a queer person.”
*****
I brought that leveled up sense of New York queer embodiment to the Brooklyn Pride March. My fellow Dharma QTs were representing with new t-shirts painting the Brooklyn Zen Center logo with the multicolors of the Progress Pride flag representing a multiracial LGBTQ+ movement. As we marched, my queer and trans identity solidified in new ways.
Lessons Learned in marching Pride with the Dharma Queer & Trans Sangha:
I delight in the delight of young children delighting in our queer and trans expression. This pure love heals. What a fest in mudita — how young children brought their pure joy experiencing joy of us marchers! How wonderful it is to see the faces of 3-year-olds light up when they get the opportunity to give me a high five and excitedly tell me, “Happy Pride!” My young closeted inner child felt changed witnessing their delight. And that joy only expands, as I keep sharing this favorite story with others when they ask about my trip.
I don’t have to represent queerness or transness in a particular way to be seen as relevant for Pride. As I shared in a recent post, I sometimes feel uncertain about identifying as trans, despite more and more people perceiving my bearded fat femme expression as trans expression in a particularly transphobic political moment. Marching Pride this year, witnessed by the young children and adults, I practiced receiving their trans recognition when they spotted me. Marching in New York, I felt my deep gratitude swell to gender expansive people who have come before me, including the Stonewall Riots. I comfortably embody my physical presentation as it is, and feel grateful to embody myself without enforced gender conformity.
Everyone is limited by heteronormativity in who and how they love. Everyone is limited by binary gender expectations in how they express themselves, their priorities, their needs and desires. I had years as a cis straight ally, even co-coordinating the 2008 Out on the Colorado Plateau from this role. (I am grateful for dancing with queers soon after that, waking up my body from decades of enforced slumber in any sense of my sexuality). From all that I’ve changed in the past 18 years — with the support of mindfulness as an opportunity to feel what my body actually feels — I have a lot of respect for the way we can all unpack our enforced gender and sexuality identities and move from a more nuanced and complex version of ourselves.
Queer dharma helps me live and enjoy a queer life. I could feel how my capacity to be mindfully queer was what helped me delight in queer beach time and move in queer connection with my travel buddy to co-plan and co-travel with them, co-llaboratively. As mindful self-compassion allows me to feel into my actual experience, I can express myself with ease rather than cultural restraint.
As the RENT cast sings rent-free in my head, this trip was quite the “Season of Love” — and this deepening of queer embodiment feels like a special self-love early birthday present as I prepare to turn 50 later this year.
Image description: A selfie of Dawn with rainbow floral sunglasses perched over her teal blue glasses, head and chin hair brown-and-gray curly, mouth open in pride . The light blue t-shirt shows the Brooklyn Zen Center logo with the stripes of the Progress Pride flag.
Want to connect with fellow Dharma QTs? We’re online, and welcome you wherever you are!
While rooted with the Brooklyn Zen Center, the Dharma QTs meet ONLINE on the third Mondays of the month, 7-8:30p ET | 4-5:30p PT. We welcome LGBTQIA+ community from around the globe.
More info here.
Contact info@brooklynzen.org for the link to participate.
Have your own lessons to learn stirred up this Pride?
I have found 1:1 coaching to be especially helpful when my inner critic gets in the way of my self-expression.
As philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti reminds us, “You might think you’re thinking your own thoughts. You’re not. You’re thinking your culture’s thoughts.”
How annoying for my mind to be still spewing so much BS from the dominant culture, decades after finding and embracing feminism!
Mindfulness and therapy have been meaningful frameworks for noticing my present feelings, and then processing and healing the specific past events that implanted these culturally conditioned thoughts on a very personal level.
With coaching, I have found tangible tools to pinpoint and uproot those implanted thoughts, centering new ways of thinking that support my joy and success. These tools have been so helpful, I jumped on the opportunity to be in the first cohort certified in the Socratic Coaching Method that feminist coach Kara Loewentheil is sharing with the world. (Her ‘greatest hits’ podcast on 3 Keys to Changing Your Thoughts is full of wisdom on how unmanaged thoughts create feelings that drive your behaviors — and how you can manage your thinking to manage your life in new ways).
Curious to learn more about coaching? I would love to talk with you! Here’s a link to schedule 30 minutes on zoom. On this call, I can share more about what I’ve learned from coaching, and what this style of coaching is and could be. If you are feeling interested in receiving my coaching support, we can creatively think together about how coaching could support you. It will be a treat to connect and explore together!
Dawn! Thank you for this spectacular storytelling. I simply love all of it and appreciate you for sharing it. :-)