Bodies talk
sparring, dancing, conflict- the thrill of proximity
As always, I find myself on the dance floor, and I can’t stop smiling. I am inside the music and it is inside me and the happy bodies of people I love and people I do not yet know are moving beside and around me.
My freshman year of high school, I had lost my baby fat and was navigating newfound visibility. Which is to say, I was skipping a lot of class to spend time with Polish boys in Oz Park. Which is to say, my grades were slipping.
My quite achievement-oriented parents were scandalized by the first C appearing on my report card, a letter they had likely never seen in their academic lives, and definitely not in mine. I was grounded, of course. But something else happened in their closed-door conversations about how to get me back on track to be a surgeon or politician or whatever. They grounded themselves too. “This is a family failing, and we will treat it like one,” was the message. And, at the climax of their speech, there was something else. “Since you need discipline, you and your father will start martial arts together.”
And off we went to Thousand Waves, a dojo in Boystown run by the toughest lesbian couple you’ve ever met, both high-ranking black belts with eyes in the back of their heads.
This space was dripping in lesbians, and was certainly the first step in solving the problem of those Polish boys, but that is a story for another day.
What I want to talk about is fighting. Sparring. It quickly became my favorite class— a chance for closeness with the dojo’s teenagers, the kind of closeness that came only through the body’s clash. I was so awkward around these teenagers off of the dojo floor. I could barely form sentences around them. But when the body could talk? Sparring is so hot! Sweaty and intense and you are so close to each other, looking for openings, and when an opening is found— what emerges? Contact! More closeness! I was drunk on it.
Growing up in a household with two sisters and a best friend who basically lived with us, conflict was never in short supply. Someone was often yelling or crying— clothes were borrowed without permission, feelings were hurt by reckless proclamations, or something totally unrelated to the sisterhood was taken out within the context of one’s closest relationships— relationships with no threat of abandonment. I quickly learned that conflict and closeness were not opposed, but could be two sides of the same coin. As I often say, my older sister Sarah would be the one driving me onto my bed crying, and the one sitting at the foot of my bed, coaxing me back into the world. She was the injurer and the nurse.
This is one view of conflict, enacted between the girls of the May family. This type of conflict was deeply safe, the training grounds for intimacy. I did not, for example, learn the same thing about conflict with men. And I know not everyone has this story. Working out rupture and repair within sisterhood is an experience I am so very grateful for— and my siblings and I regularly still practice this with each other.
In 2022, as an adult, I returned to martial arts, training at a dojo in the Bay Area where the lead teacher was also lesbian, and knew my teachers from Chicago. It was no fluke that I had grown up in a lesbian dojo, I was learning. A vast network of lesbians across the country had embraced self-defense and martial arts as empowerment during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, opening gyms, studios and dojos for others to learn these skills.
It was in this year that I went to train at PAWMA (Pacific Association of Women Martian Artists), an intensive week of martial arts that was being held driving distance from Oakland, where I lived.
When I first pulled up, I ran into my Chicago teachers— the couple hadn’t aged a day— and spent the week receiving correction and instruction from them, just as it has always been.
During this week, my body was constantly sore, and I was constantly smiling. I also spent the week sparring. “I am a joyful fighter,” our sparring teacher said. “I always smile when I fight.”
Me too, I thought.
I entered the PAWMA sparring competition and competed against lesbians of all ages. At a certain point, it was only young folks left on the floor, while the older generation women-spread on the sidelines, shouting suggestions and form corrections at us. My Chicago teachers pulled me to the side like boxing coaches and gave me advice about the other fighters I would face and how my techniques would need to shift. It was clear— I was outmatched. Kicks and punches landed continuously into my protective gear. They were quick, and strong, this younger generation of they/them dykes.
Still I smiled. I was learning. How and when to block. I was also beginning to learn something else— not always to lean into conflict, but sometimes to back away, get out of range.
Now, my own aging body can’t sustain martial arts practice in the same way, relegating me to the yoga and pilates mat, where conflict is rare, but I am still in a room full of bodies moving. My hormones aren’t raging quite as hard, and my teachers have retired. PAWMA is no more, tragically unable to keep pace with the gender evolution of they/them dykes and other nonwomen into a more expansive world.
I may return to sparring one day, but even if not, I have my whole lifetime to unpack sparring-floor learnings. And, of course, there is also the dance floor, where we don’t hit and kick each other, but we do move together, and sometimes very close.