For a couple of reasons, I tend to write quite a bit about both feminism and LGBT rights. One, as a woman and a lesbian, both movements have been incredibly important in helping me put words to my lived experiences in a patriarchal, heterosexist society.

Adam & Steve

Two, I see feminism and LGBT advocacy, neither of which is a monolithic movement of course, as linked. Much of the homophobia directed at gay and bisexual men is based in the stereotype that gay and bi men are effeminate and, of course, many consider effeminacy to be a status downgrade from masculinity, which is the superior gender identity.

Being a certain kind of girl  (no not that kind), I realize that I’m treated like a wandering and confused straight girl at even the gayest of events. A gaggle of butches try to help me: “Ma’am, are you lost? Do you know where your fag is?”

The only recourse is to throw the cutest one up against the wall and show them how it’s done. Of course, by “it” I mean a Taekwondo takedown. I show them where their kata is. What did you think I meant? We already covered that I’m not that kind of girl. Keep up.

In my car I keep a roadside emergency kit, first aid kit, and 7-day survival pack for my dogs and me. (I should have been a Girl Scout but the sash would have over accentuated my “extra-medium” waistline.) I try to be prepared to the point that I also carry at least 1/2 dozen roadside flares. They have come in handy several times.

In the past few weeks I have had to use them twice as I happened upon people who were in need. As I came upon the accident, I saw two co-workers standing near one of the cars on the shoulder of the freeway on ramp and a second car down the embankment about 30 feet away. I stopped to help; thankfully everyone seemed shaken but okay. My co-workers were not part of the accident but saw what happened. Concerned for their safety on that curved road, I laid three lit flares several yards from the accident so oncoming traffic would be alerted as they rounded the bend. A third co-worker in her truck (yes, she is “family” too) pulled over to see if she could offer aid. Eventually, emergency services arrived and I left. The next day the two co-workers who saw the accident thanked me separately and said that I and the other “sister” were the only two people who stopped to help. As both my co-workers are devout Christians who were not silent about their efforts to pass Prop 8, I politely responded to them, “Isn’t it interesting that the only two people who offered to help were gay. I am hoping the next time there is a vote to take my rights away you will remember that.”

So, what’s with the hair?

The simple query posed with a bit of a smirk from a former co-worker who knew me way back when, whom I haven’t seen in several years, called for a simple response. But this is hair and hair is not simple. Hair is a pile of kinky twists steeped in tradition, political, and cultural mores. Hair is about weekly trips to The Beauty Shop or hours spent pressing or curling unless you are blessed with good hair. Hair is about the constant argument as to what is pretty and more importantly, acceptable. Hair is about identity. Hair is big. And way back when, I had big hair with the big, complicated, twisty acceptance issues to match.

So the latest news out of the Vatican concerns a gay prostitution ring organized by one of the pope’s elite group of ceremonial ushers. According to Reuters, “among four people arrested last month in the corruption probe was Angelo Balducci, a member of an elite group called ‘Gentlemen of His Holiness’, ushers who are called to serve in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace on major occasions such as when the pope receives heads of state.”

I’m just going to put my pen down now, because the comedy writes itself. It’s too easy. As easy as a Vatican usher, apparently, but…. OK, seriously, I’m done.

I came roaring into town, Heteroburbiaville a bland, but now distant memory.  I slammed on my brakes with all my might as the blinding bright colors before me shimmered in reflection off my windshield just as the stoplight turned from yellow to red.  As I idled, anxious to continue, I noticed the long row of rainbow flags waving proudly in front of each building down the boulevard, like a row of fabulous and stylish swishing and swaying sentinels just waiting for my arrival.  I gave a sigh of relief.  I’d finally returned to the Gayborhood.

As the car rolled a few miles through the ‘hood, I felt an overwhelming urge to pull up in front of a very lovely homoburbian house.  Subtle, understated, but with an immaculately maintained exterior: “Must be lesbians,” I thought.  I pulled the Gaymobile over and stepped out.  I stood watching, somehow unseen, as events unfolded around me.

If you’re nosy like me, sometimes you meet someone at work or in a social situation where there is something unusual about them, something that you don’t know much about but would like to.  And then you want to ask a lot of personal questions to help you better understand this person.  (Ok, so maybe you just want to ask because you’re nosy, like me.  But work with me here.)

As an example, the first time I met someone with AIDS I wanted to ask things like “How do you think you got it?” and “How did you feel when you got the test results?”  Luckily I do possess just the tiniest shred of tact, and I usually refrain from probing too deeply – at least until I’ve had a chance to know the person long enough to form some sort of bond.  At which point I get comfortable enough to pull out the thumbscrews and start my own little Spanish Inquisition.

Despite my fondness for posing personal questions, I am sometimes less fond of answering them.  For instance, I am always taken a little by surprise when I become friends with a straight person and they start asking me questions about my oh-so-exotic gayness.  I don’t know why these questions would bother or even surprise me, considering how damn nosy I am about everyone else’s private information.  My discomfort may stem from the fact that my life seems normal to me — and it’s jarring to realize suddenly that someone I know finds my situation odd or difficult.

At work I end up meeting a lot of straight people who don’t know many gay people, if they know any at all.  They are usually the ones with the questions – the first one always being “When did you realize you were gay?”

I always struggle with this question because I don’t have a clear answer.  And why should I?  Sexual orientation – and I’m talking overall orientation, not just gay, straight or bi – is something that is unique to each individual, and, when you get down to it, cannot be placed neatly into a little box with a label stuck on it.  How am I supposed to know when I “realized” what I was, when the “what” is not even all that easy to define?

Occasionally I’ve heard that the suggested retort to such a question should be “Well, when did you know you were straight?”  Although I wholly appreciate the spirit of this response, being a lover of all things sarcastic, I don’t find the response entirely fitting – because when discussing growing up gay vs. growing up straight we’re comparing apples to oranges.

But just to amuse ourselves, let’s start there anyway.  When do most people realize they are straight?

Maybe they realize it from the minute they are born, when their parents, families, friends and entire communities start imprinting upon them the notion that their lives will consist of growing into adolescence, finding mates of the opposite gender, falling deeply in love with said mates, marrying them and making babies.

People who in their hearts want to follow the formula outlined above never have their orientation put into question.  There is no AHA! moment for these people, no sudden realization of what their general sexual orientation is.  They are born with their default “straight” buttons already activated and no one has to ask them when this all occurred.  The question is meaningless.

Just as the question so often posed to me seems meaningless.  Or if not meaningless, so fraught with complications and nuances that the question becomes unanswerable.  And therefore meaningless – at least to me.

If we gays of a certain generation (meaning those of us born before the early 1980s) had been given the information we needed – which is that some people are gay, some are straight, and some are somewhere in-between – we might have grown up better equipped to answer the “When did you realize you were gay?” question.  But that’s not the way it happened.

What we have instead are the generations of gay people, those of us born any time before the early 1980s, who had to negotiate the usual torture and confusion of adolescence with the added burden of having no validation or acknowledgment of who we were.

A bit much to throw at a 13-year-old kid, if you ask me.  Which is why I find the “When did you realize you were gay?” question particularly troublesome and complicated, if not downright offensive when you really start to think about it.

When did I realize I was gay?  Which of the terrifying moments of my childhood and adolescence should I pinpoint and mark as the final AHA! moment that seems so important to you?  Was it the moment my older brother started calling me “fag” before I even knew what that was?  Was it the moment I noticed Tom B. in the hallway of my junior high and was inexplicably drawn to want to be his friend?  Was it the moment I rode an elevator with my schoolmates and members of a gay men’s chorus, who upon exiting were mocked by my classmates?  (“Don’t scratch your butts anyone, you’ll get AIDS!”)  Was it the moment I thought for the first time there might be no future to my life except AIDS, discrimination and loneliness?  Or was it the moment I realized everyone in the entire world was probably going to hate me?

The short answer is, I don’t know and I don’t really give a shit.  Just leave me the fuck alone and quit asking about it as if it’s a question you could even begin to understand.  And now that I’ve thought this through, maybe I’ll think twice before launching any future Spanish Inquisitions of my own.

Love and coasters,

CP

My favorite sport is shopping. I dare not go anywhere near a shopping center unless I have at least two hours to spend. I can shop for hours, thoroughly enjoying myself the whole time, and not spend a dime. Of course, it’s best when I find a gorgeous item on the clearance rack, it is 90% off, and it fits. I call that “winning the lottery.” I win the lottery quite often because I am a good shopper.

The one curiosity I have discovered is that there are articles of clothing marked “one size fits all.” What I have found is that these items really do not fit anyone well. What they say, and what the reality is are two entirely different things. I currently have three items in my closet that are one size fits all. One is a night gown that I love, not because it fits, but because it is much larger than me and is made from a heavenly blend of fabrics.

I have been doing some other kinds of shopping lately too. I was divorced last August and was thoroughly enjoying my newfound status as a single girl. But as has been my pattern, within a few months I was thinking how nice it would be to have someone who wanted to share their life with me and who wanted to be a part of mine. So I did what you are supposed to do. I went online and started shopping for a girlfriend. My user ID was transgrrl and I told the truth of who I am in neatly organized paragraphs, uploaded my most flattering photos, and I answered hundreds of profile questions. I never once hid the fact that I am a transsexual woman.

On the first site I was matched with five women, so I wrote to them all. Some didn’t respond for weeks, a couple responded right away. They were all good people, as far as I could tell. But it all seemed so backwards to me. It seemed to me you should meet first, get to know each other, and then come to a decision on whether to enter into a serious relationship. Instead we emailed back and forth, occasionally talked on the phone, and only once did I actually meet the girl. I was frustrated by the whole experience because as I browsed profiles, I found out that everyone was just like me, except not trans. They like reading, walks on the beach, romantic dinners by the fireplace, and on and on. One size seemed to fit all, but not me.

One of my girlfriends who loves going to movies and hanging out recommended I try a site she found helpful, and it was totally free. I got home late that night, but decided to check out the site, and ended up going to bed around midnight, having only setup a user ID and password. The next morning I already had a message from a woman. I was impressed! She must be a woman of discerning tastes to write me with nothing to go on except the user name transgrrl. And she lived much closer to me!

I wrote her back, and after a few thousand messages back and forth, we eventually talked on the phone. After a couple of weeks of talking on the phone for about a gazillion hours, we met in person. My girlfriends told me that once you meet in person, not matter how much you may have learned about each other, you will know right away if this is a relationship you want to pursue or not. That little tidbit made our first meeting so much more stressful! It was like it all hinged on this first face to face meeting.

We talked about possible meeting places; the coffee shop, a café, a local park, and even a winery were possibilities. I wanted her to know that I trusted her, so I invited her to come to my place for our first meeting. If she didn’t like the way I lived, at least she would know right away and could still get out of this gracefully.

The day of our meeting came and I was nervous, bordering on panic. What if she didn’t like me? I decided to talk to one of my most trusted friends who told me how stupid it is to give a stranger your home address and have her come there for the first meeting. That had never once occurred to me, but it was too late to change now. Chances were that she was already on her way over.

Dating is extra hard when you haven’t done it in so long that you haven’t kept up with the rules. But my worries were all unnecessary. We connected right away, chatting like old friends and feeling like we had always known each other. It was the best first date that either of us had ever had.

And I’m sure that what we did would not necessarily be the best for everyone reading this because one size rarely fits anyone. But for me, it was a perfect fit. Definitely a perfect fit.

Join us for our Saturday morning stroll through the Gayborhood.  Today, meet our co-editor, Margo Moon.

Nobody told me what the secret was when I was growing up.  But, when it happens, I  feel all springy fresh like I do when I get out of a long, warm shower and every inch of my skin is totally alive.  It happens in that minute when you know you’ve bumped up against somebody who can make you better at the things you love to do most.

When I was a kid, I would head down to our basement rec room with my two younger brothers and kick their asses in darts.  It didn’t take much, we all sucked; me just less than them.  I never really got better and the results were too predictable to make it fun for long.

But, I loved the idea of darts.  I loved the precision and the skill it required to win.  I just didn’t have it in me to do it well.  Then, I met a bunch of dart leaguers when I was in the military.  They were awesome.  Unfortunately, they got less awesome as the pitchers of beer which always accompanied the game settled, eventually challenging their eye/hand coordination to such a degree that their tossing darts reminded me of my nearly-blind, senile great grandpa trying to drive down Main Street.  My competitive eye watched their wrists and their points strategy – just before I bought them the next pitcher. They still made me better.

When I wanted to rise up in my job after spending years stalling out at what I described as my version of the Peter Principle, I found a job with a hard-driving but mentoring boss who taught me some tough lessons, allowed me to stretch, fall, get up, fall again, and ultimately stand tall.  And once the bruises faded from my battle with my own ego I moved onward and upward; all with her blessing and full support.  She made me better.

Long about three years ago, give or take, I got a comment on my personal blog from someone with the funny name of Margo Moon.  I went to her brand new blog and started reading.  Immediately, I fell in love with the character Margo and the star of the show, Starr Ann.  Then I read other fiction she’d written and that springy fresh feeling was hot on my trail.

Somehow, she got me to write a very short piece of fiction.  I felt inadequate, but excited.  When I had an idea for a short story, republished here last Sunday, she was the very best kind of editor – encouraging but direct in areas that might need work.  My story was better for it.

We’ve never met in person, but she is one of a handful of people I trust with passwords.  Secrets.  Blunt observations.  She sees the world with child-like wonder and reminds me when I fall too deeply into spreadsheet mode that my child needs to come out and play and she does.  That’s trust.  That came in time, but this was a friendship truly borne of words.  And, I’m better for it.

We as co-editors have a shared vision for what our site is and what we hope it will become regardless of our different, yet ultimately dovetailing approaches.  We want the writers here to grow in their craft and we want to provide our readers with something that might strike a chord and make them better in some small way for having stopped by.

When I was four years old and went into the bathroom with all of my classmates during preschool, I witnessed other little boys being able to stand and pee.  Instantly, I was jealous and insulted by the fact that I had not been born with that ability.  I knew that one day I would and I made that my life’s mission. Well, not quite.

I really knew when I was that young I wanted to be a boy.  There were a lot of mornings I’d wake up before the rest of my family, put shaving cream on my face, and pretend to shave it off with the back of a comb.  After a bath, I’d lock myself in the bathroom and try to style my hair like John Travolta’s character in “Grease”.  When I played house with my friends, I always wanted to be the dad or the dog, but mostly the dog because that was gender neutral.  These events seemed normal to me at the time.  I just thought every little girl wanted to be a boy, and so did my family.  They thought it was a phase and they called me a tomboy, certainly thinking I’d grow out of this phase by the time I reached my adult life.  I certainly hoped it would pass, but deep down, I wasn’t convinced it would.

As I got to high school and even through college, I wanted to deny being who I was as long as I could because it was just so out there.  No one really seemed to know or to want to know what being trans was, including me.  I didn’t know anyone who was trans either, which didn’t help.   All I knew was that the portrayals I saw of trans people in the media and on TV showed them to be prostitutes, mentally unstable, outcasts of society, and these types of labels were not the ones I wanted to be associated with.  Being gay was hard enough for people to grasp.  So, I tried as hard as I could to be the butchest, baddest lesbian around, and it stuck for a while.

At 25 though, I decided to turn in my butch badge and start my transition, hormones and all.   I realized that the only way to be completely happy is to stop denying who I am and to embrace it. And who I am isn’t a lesbian (although I did make many femmes swoon when I donned my butchwear).  I am just a guy who is attracted to girls. I had just been born into the wrong body.

So, here I am two years later, and I couldn’t be happier, well I could be, but with other things like the economy, healthcare, you know. These issues affect me just like anyone else, (I’m no different just because I was born into the wrong body).   But my quality of life has improved immensely, truly.  I actually like being trans, it’s really not as scary as everybody would probably think.  Going through puberty for a second time was worth it especially because I finally attained the masculine characteristics I had dreamed of: facial hair and muscle mass.   When I look in the mirror, I am still me, just with the handsome face I had wanted for so long.

I actually think there are a lot of great benefits to being a trans person.  Because I was born a woman and socialized that way, I have a unique perspective on a lot of things.  My girlfriend is especially appreciative of my ability to empathize with her when she’s PMSing or dealing with her period.   My male friends like that I can confirm that it isn’t their fault that sex is always on their minds.  The best benefit of all though is that I am able to draw from my past experience as a woman and my current experience as a man to successfully talk to people and educate them.   I’m able to let people see for themselves that trans people are human beings just like everyone else.

The pursuit of happiness really is embracing who you are, or at least, it is for me.   I went through life for so long unhappy and uncomfortable in my own skin.  It is remarkable to note the difference between how I felt before I transitioned and after.  The greatest lesson I learned really was I should never be ashamed of who I am, no matter how people judge me.  The greatest discomfort I ever felt was when I wasn’t comfortable with myself, not when other people were uncomfortable with me.   I am proud to be who I am. I have a lot of great qualities that define me in addition to being trans.  It’s time to let the world see that.