Respect Your Elders is a monthly column in which Lou Barrett sits down with an LGBTQ+ elder in their community and gets to know them over a cup of tea.
M. Carmen Lane and I met on a Sunday afternoon in Cleveland Heights. Carmen is the founder of ATNSC: Center for Healing & Creative Leadership, “an urban retreat center and social practice experiment in holistic health, leadership development, Indigenous arts and culture” and the Akhsótha Gallery, located in the historic Buckeye-Shaker neighborhood. Carmen is also a birth/postpartum and end-of-life doula. We met on the east side of Cleveland at Luna Bakery. Our city is very community driven with lots of long standing small businesses like Luna Bakery. The space is cozy, and full of really good sweets. Carmen wore a maroon sweater and a fedora. We’d never met, but their jewelry and black rimmed glasses led me to them.
“Coming out has always been a layered process for me,” Carmen told me over avocado toast.
Carmen, 44, is a two-spirit African-American Haudenosaunee artist and consultant. When they first came out, they were 19. A student, they were working towards their degree in Women’s Studies and identified as a black lesbian feminist. In their late 20s, they later came out as two-spirit.
“Two-Spirit is a shorthand, because it’s an English translation. It’s more like two ‘worlds’ or the totality of creation. So when someone says they’re two-spirit, it doesn’t mean half man/half woman or both man and woman. It’s like I’m male and female and not male and not female and I’m a man and I’m a woman — it’s all of these things that bridge space and time, because who we were and are and continue to be has been molested by colonization.”
Carmen talked about how as someone who was immersed in women of color feminism, the word “queer” never felt right for them. They see it as a word used by white gay men. Nonetheless, Carmen sometimes uses “queer” to bridge the gap between generations or “non-binary” when talking to non-Native people.
“Two-Spirit became an important word for me, because all of these commas and qualifiers didn’t feel good to me for myself and in the larger LGBT movement.”
They addressed how mainstream LGBT culture is informed by white LGBT people and their worldview. “The expectation is that my experience of being in a body that is brown is in addition to that worldview.”
Later, Carmen expanded on these ideas.
“Two-Spirit helped me to reclaim the whole of me that was also culture, because how we understand gender is culturally bound. So I reject the ways in which particularly white LGBT people get to define my norm and expect me to get on board with them. So I’m not particularly interested in tacking on Black or tacking on Indigenous to a very tiny white frame of gender identity, so a part of my coming out has also been about coming out to not locate myself within the larger LGBT community.”
We shifted between many topics throughout our conversation, but this was one we continued coming back to: The idea is that white queer often don’t see how it affects our experience of being gay or trans or lesbian etc. Because our culture is lived through the lens of whiteness, we aren’t forced to consider what that means for how we came to be who we are.
Carmen put this all into one concise statement. “I’ve never heard any kind of white queer or white trans person or a white nonbinary person say that their whiteness informs their meaning making around how they understand their gender and themselves.”
Carmen has also identified as butch for much of their life. They’ve always dated femmes. As a femme who exclusively dates transmasculine and gendernonconforming people, many of whom identify as butch, I’m always delighted to talk to someone who uses the word butch with pride. I also admit that I loved being able to ask Carmen questions about the butch experience that would be much harder to ask a lover.
They told me about how they wept while reading Stone Butch Blues with their friends. “We were crying like babies over this book. That’s not a fiction, and I think its still a reality for many people when it comes to folks who are masculine and cannot pass for straight or cisgender.”
We both agreed that there are issues with the ways that people discuss, or don’t discuss, butch/femme relationships.
Carmen offered, “I find, to my horror, a lot of critique through a lens of classism of butch/femme dynamics.”
I asked them to elaborate.
“I think given all the conversations we like to have around gender and gender variance at all, somehow butch/femme isn’t included in that,” Carmen continued, “That feels classist. That feels racist. It feels biased when it comes to creating a hierarchy of what kinds of gender variance is acceptable and can be visible, and it also erases the notion that butch/femme is also about gender identity and that gender is relational, and I think in a western context people want to make gender about themselves, and there’s no way to be gendered without being interconnected.”
While I’d thought about gender as performative, and something that can influence a reaction or an action, I hadn’t conceptualized it as relational. I said I’d need to give it some thought, and have been thinking about it every day since.
I continued with my agenda, “I hate people’s critiques of butch/femme relationships as heteronormative, because I think it’s such a simplified view of gender and what those relationships look like.”
“And it’s a view that’s absent of curiosity.”
Admittedly, I love talking to butches so that I can better understand how they feel about their femme counterparts in relationships.
Carmen talked about the powers femmes have. They also shared their opinion on one thing that can go wrong in butch/femme relationships. “Part of how a femme can break your heart is by both acknowledging your masculinity and then making your masculinity the problem.”
I haven’t stopped thinking about that since our conversation either.
While I have such a deep interest in relationships between butches and femmes, I knew our conversation was about many different things and turned my focus to other topics. As with the conversation on whiteness, we continued finding our way back to Carmen’s two-spirit identity and what it means for them.
Carmen shared that unlike queer people in Western society, two-spirit people are centered rather than marginalized. “I’m Mohawk and Tuscarora, and some of those teachings talk about two-spirit people being at the edge of the woods. That means you come to me. I don’t come to you. I don’t need to assimilate or bend in a direction that has nothing to do with what I’m responsible for in the community.”
After talking for almost an hour and a half, I asked what advice they had for the younger generation of queer people.
“To know their history, and to know the multiplicity of experience of those who came before them and decide the multiple ways that they get to express and grow over time… The advice more simply is to be curious in an intergenerational context, because it doesn’t matter how old you are — if you’re not curious about the other you’re gonna lose some learning, you’re gonna lose connection, and you’re gonna lose the nuance.”
Finally they said, “Do not have any expectation for the mainstream LGBT movement, but be clear about what your work is.”
I left our conversation feeling energized despite the chamomile tea I’d enjoyed. We can read all about queer history in books, but nothing beats talking to someone who lived it.
You can catch Carmen at their upcoming talk, Open the Door: Memory, Mourning, and the Ancestor as Foundation, at Northwestern University on February 18th, or check out their exhibition, AMALA: She Could Not Stay (In Their Black Bodies), at the Praxis Fiber Workshop in Cleveland opening on February 7th. For more information, visit their website.
Oh, damn. I loved the interview, especially this line: “there’s no way to be gendered without being interconnected.” Thank you!
Yeah their perspective on gender was super interesting! I often have thought of gender very differently so I’ve been chewing on this a lot. Glad you liked it!
This was a fantastic interview!! Thank you
Thank you for reading! Glad you liked it!
Thank you! I’m glad you liked it!
so excited about this series!!!
Thank you!
I love the idea of intergenerational curiosity! I have always appreciated having younger and older people around. Now I have teenagers and find being curious about who they are a helpful perspective!
Yeah I think it’s cool to hear how different our understandings and perspectives can be on the same topics. Interviewing has been super fun. I’m glad you liked the article!
This was a great interview! and I am very much looking forward to the rest of this series. :)
Thank you! Interviewing people has been so exciting. I can’t wait to keep writing more.
Thank you so much for sharing M. Carmen Lane’s words with us.
You’re welcome! Thank you for reading it! Glad you liked it!
It’s a great interview and read, but I take some offense at calling a 44-year-old an elder of the LGBTQ community. As a 40 year old, the people I consider to be elders of this community are people who were actually on the front lines of the AIDS crisis in the 80s. People who planned funerals for friends and loved ones, cared for the sick or dying and lived through that loss. We are lucky to have actual elders in our community now, women and men in their 60s and 70s who survived and have the history of the community written into their bones. But, 44 is still young, even to the 27 year old in seeing who balked at the use of “elder” in the title of this series. There are plenty of things to learn from every generation, but if you’re actually using the word “elder” you might want to speak to people who are actually elderly.
Totally get it! This column is ongoing. The majority of people I’m interviewing are over 55. Most over 60. M. Carmen Lane was aware of how the article was for a column on older LGBTQ+ Folks in Cleveland, and that I’m typically going to be interviewing people above 55. However, because their experience and perspective is so underrepresented I made the decision to flex on the age range for this piece and may do it on another for a similar reason. I chose 55 as a standard, because SAGE groups are for LGBTQ+ Folks that are 55+ and volunteering in those groups inspired the column. “Respect your Elders” felt like a fun quirky column title. My goal was not to be insensitive. Sorry that was your experience. I’m glad you liked the article! Thank you for your feedback!
Thanks for your comment. This article is so offensive in many ways. And the response was not a valid reason. Elderly should at minimum be 65, which is the mainstream retirement age, age to start getting elderly benefits and above but even then confirm with the people and audience that it’s an appropriate term. I’m kind of sickened at the thought of how Americans treat the elderly and this is a classic example. People in their 30’s 40’s, 50,s are in their prime, smarter, richer, wiser and better at everything from self care to sex. And if you don’t feed into mainstream media people in their 60s and 70s can be more active and respected.
Thank you both for reading my article! I’m glad it’s getting traction this long after it was published. I’m sorry you were offended by the title of the article. It’s the title of the column, and part of the intention was to be catchy. If I could do it again, I may have asked my editor if this piece could be separate from the column. However, I still think it works well in this series. I could see how seeing an article with this title and then seeing it’s about a 44 year old could feel surprising or confusing. M. Carmen knew the column would be called Respect Your Elders, and we laughed and had a back and forth before starting the interview since they’re obviously not an “elder.” The majority of articles for this column are about people over 60. I flexed on age for this article, because I was interested in showcasing M. Carmen’s experience since there are not tons of stories about black indigenous two spirit people. I am aware that 44 is not elderly, and knew that before this was published. However, I also think there’s an interesting discussion to be had about how “elder” can mean something different in queer culture. Since things change so rapidly, someone who is 44 is going to have had a wildly different experience than someone who is 30. A 55 year old’s experience is going to be different than someone who is 44 and so on. Autostraddle’s audience is heavily millennial and Gen Z so I still saw the benefit in sharing a 44 year old’s experience for younger people to learn from and acknowledge. Again, I’m sorry that the title offended people and that it distracted from the positive aspects of the article. I hope you have a good day!
44 is not an elder. You can’t even get an AARP discount at that age! I thought it was a super interesting article, but the elder part was a bit misleading.
Totally get it! This column is ongoing. The majority of people I’m interviewing are over 55. M. Carmen Lane was aware of how the article was for a column on older LGBTQ+ Folks in Cleveland, and that I’m typically going to be interviewing people above 55. However, because their experience and perspective is so underrepresented I made the decision to flex on the age range for this piece and may do it on another for a similar reason. I chose 55 as a standard, because SAGE groups are for LGBTQ+ Folks that are 55+ and volunteering in those groups inspired the column. “Respect your Elders” felt like a fun quirky column title. I’m glad you liked the article! Thank you for your feedback!
Thank you @louthebarrett – I’m really glad you made this decision and that M Carmen Lane agreed to share this convo with the AS community. For me, they are a generation ahead of me, with an elder’s perspective to share, and hopefully a lot of learning and life ahead for all of us!!
I thought the same and it was weird to focus on an article when you are wondering who would write that. I want to love this content this article could have been. But how can I trust an author who would call a 44 year old an elder?
Many thanks @louthebarrett to you and Carmen. I have been carrying this with me for a couple of weeks and it has been so good for me. I grew up on Kiikaapoi and Myaamia/Miami land and my g’ma grew up in Cleveland – it gives me a lot of calm and strength to learn about elders who have been living and doing things for so long in this part of the continent.
Calling a 44 year old an elder is misleading, offensive and just wrong On so many levels. The authors reply to being called out about this is not good enough. Let’s not even get into ageism and how disrespectful Americans already are to out actual elders
Thank you for reading my article! I’m glad it’s getting traction this long after it was published. I’m sorry you were offended by the title of the article. It’s the title of the column, and part of the intention was to be catchy. If I could do it again, I may have asked my editor if this piece could be separate from the column. However, I still think it works well in this series. I could see how seeing an article with this title and then seeing it’s about a 44 year old could feel surprising or confusing. M. Carmen knew the column would be called Respect Your Elders, and we laughed and had a back and forth before starting the interview since they’re obviously not an “elder.” The majority of articles for this column are about people over 60. I flexed on age for this article, because I was interested in showcasing M. Carmen’s experience since there are not tons of stories about black indigenous two spirit people. I am aware that 44 is not elderly, and knew that before this was published. However, I also think there’s an interesting discussion to be had about how “elder” can mean something different in queer culture. Since things change so rapidly, someone who is 44 is going to have had a wildly different experience than someone who is 30. A 55 year old’s experience is going to be different than someone who is 44 and so on. Autostraddle’s audience is heavily millennial and Gen Z so I still saw the benefit in sharing a 44 year old’s experience for younger people to learn from and acknowledge. Again, I’m sorry that the title offended people and that it distracted from the positive aspects of the article. I hope you have a good day!