The Bio of a Butch
(I'll just skip the peanut butter and chocolate jokes for now)
Therese (Reese) Szymanski is an award-winning playwright who has been short-listed for a few Lammies, a few Goldies and a Spectrum, and made the Publishing Triangle’s list of Notable Lesbian Books in 2004 and was chosen for an Alice B. Reader’s Appreciation Award for 2008.
She’s written eight Brett Higgins Motor City Thrillers (When the Dancing Stops, When the Dead Speak, When Some Body Disappears, When Evil Changes Face, When the Corpse Lies, When First We Practice and When It’s All Relative); one Shawn Donnelly book, It’s All Smoke & Mirrors: The First Chronicles of Shawn Donnelly; and edited the erotic anthologies Back to Basics, Call of the Dark, Wild Nights, Fantasy and A Perfect Valentine. She has novellas in Once Upon a Dyke; Stake through the Heart; Bell, Book and Dyke and Tall in the Saddle and has a few dozen published short stories and essays.
She’s a seasoned writer with two decades’ experience writing for nonprofit, advertising, marketing and journalistic purposes. A second-generation American, she comes from Detroit, lives in D.C., and hopes to move in with her girlfriend, Stacia, soon. Her books can be found for purchase at BellaBooks.com, Amazon.com and all sorts of other places in both the cyber and real worlds.
She occasionally teaches classes, though it's been quite a while since they've been at the college level. She's much more likely these days to be found at festivals and book signings. Well, and online.
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Me and my fam at My brother Bruce's wedding. I was an usher. Bruce and his wife referred to this picture as "Bruce and Amy in the land of the little people." Amy had shown happiness with me as an usher since, well before their marriage, she is rumored to have said that, "I'll get more bridesmaids since Bruce's sister will be in the wedding party, but on his side." The three people with the anonymous-black-circle faces suffer from a disorder known mostly as homophobia. |
The above is the basic bio. The truth is that Reese has led a quiet, simple life.
For instance, when she finally did come out, her mother expressed surprise, saying that Reese had always been such a feminine child. To allow you, the reader, to decide, we shall present two exhibits. It is up to you to determine two things from these exhibits: 1) Which one in each pic Reese is, and 2) If Reese's mother is a complete nut job, or a perfectly normal and observant human being:
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Exhibit A, Halloween when Reese was a child. Can you identify her in her clever disguise? |
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Exhibit B, an Egyptian display thingie when Reese was in grade school. |
What Reese and her family unit used to do when bored:
Fortunately, her mother never noticed the body in the basement, since Reese's homicidal tendencies and her family's love of fire arms and other tools of violence, destruction, death, and mess mixed quite nicely:
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Reese's mother would just occasionally kick it to the side when it got in the way. She was just happy Reese had finally been thoughtful and put newspaper down where she planned to slaughter her classmate before she slaughtered him. Reese only slightly misunderstood the instructions for the pretend trial she was participating in with her Civics class. Poor Steve, he showed such promise for the lawyerly arts, too.
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Since Reese paid her own way through college, she was fortunate enough to find a McDonald's franchisee that really didn't care about labor laws so she started working 40 hours a week when she was 16. Except for that little oops she made when she took a second job at Taco Bell and worked 80 hours that week.
And answered the McDonald's drive-thru speaker, "Welcome to Taco—McDonald's, may I take your order please."
To distract other managers from her slight faux paux, she next answered the speaker in broken English, surprising both co-workers and customers alike. If we're all unlucky, she might use this space to post lyrics to such McDonaldy favorites like, Rudolph the Seedless Big Mac and Dashing through the Grease.
By the time college came around, she was security guarding (though her brother Mark wouldn't hire her to do so until she'd worked elsewhere, so she did. The first time she threw a guy four times her size at Mark, Mark almost forgot to catch him he was so shocked), cooking and prep cooking at restaurants, doing reserve duty for the army, doing a few magic shows, writing for a few organizations (she got her first paid writing gig when she was 18), and other things. Mostly she was doing legal stuff. Anything other than that, well, the statute of limitations has passed on.
Once, in 1990 at Michigan State University (MSU), which had more than 40,000 undergrads at the time, MSU did a survey on LGBT students. This was very big for them to do, and she was sitting in a room of folks and we were filling out our anonymous surveys.
She came to a question and read it out loud, "Who knows I'm gay?"
"Everybody!" everyone in the room yelled. (That really was an answer on the form.) But, really, Reese was considered one of the top two out students at MSU. Mischa and Reese were actually tied for the spot, but only Reese received the following surprise one morning:
One Tuesday morning. Apparently, that was when the readership was highest. It caused a lot of problems with the homophobic boss at McDonald's, caused a few funny incidents in classes that day (like when a prof looked down, saw Reese, then looked up and saw Reese again).
Reese and Mick, her girlfriend of the time, thought the pic would be the size of, oh, a pencil eraser. And be on page 40.
So yeah, she was front-page back then, even, baby.
The next year or so, MSU spent almost ten grand to produce Reese's play about gays in the military. That was before gays in the military were much news. Someone from California introduced himself to Reese after one of the shows, saying that even progressive California wasn't that progressive, and here, MSU was.
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Reese's cast for Just a Phase (a Sapphic Tale) decided to give her a one fist salute during the cast photoshoot. The play was opening just as Reese's first book, |
With her overall outness exacerbated by the front page picture and all the publicity from the play, Reese became a target for homophobes in and around campus. She suffered heinous discrimination at her McDonald's job and also got her car spray painted, among other things.
The East Lansing cop who came to take the report and I looked at the car. I said, "I wonder if I should put a list of slurs up by the mailboxes so they can check the correct spelling, because I may be a lot of things, but I'm no earthly dam." The cop looked at the car, painted on both sides, the back and windshield, and said, "They're not exactly rocket scientists." I knew the cops wouldn't or couldn't do anything about it, but I wanted it to count on all stats being kept about hate crimes and such. Unfortunately, I had to spend the entire morning scrubbing my car with a Brillo pad, which totally destroyed the paint and made it rust even more quickly, so I didn't do too well on that day's mid-term. |
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As one of Reese's actors once said, "We're queer, so just appearing on stage is itself a political act. Reese was very used to being very political and very much loved by the critics, things that aren't so much true these days—but Barbara Grier used to comment on some of the mail she received and how many women thanked her for pulling them off the brink by showing them other women like themselves.
Back in those days, women often felt they were alone, that they were the only people in the world who felt like they did. Reaching out to these people through our writing is an amazing and wonderful thing and even though gays are everywhere these days, we can't take anything for granted, or else we might wake up one morning and find our cars spraypainted and our jobs gone to straight people and our ability to love who we choose gone because we weren't vigilant enough to protect each and every right, so our writing is important, no matter how much fun it might be at times!
Names are titles that seal our fate.
If she wears a dress and bakes
call her Becky, Sue or Kate.
But I beg on bended knees,
if her pants aren't neatly creased,
never, ever name her Therese.
Wearing lipstick and stilettos,
Lesley surely wouldn't oppose,
while Chris and Patricia strike a pose.
Romance authors with ink and quill
in naming characters
I urge you still.
A tux is needed for Therese to wear
so in the pocket a kerchief is near
to wipe away your hurting tears.
Make her strong, rugged and tough
and just cocky enough
to strut her stuff.
No lace or frills
can grace her build
and in her arms you'll have a thrill.
Romance authors if you please,
understand this heartfelt plea
no femme should wear the tag of Reese.
—Lois Glen
Me and my Stacia.