The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You (18 page)

(The hapless husbands, it is worth mentioning, had fled into the safety of the building by this point, muttering something indistinct about more coffee after seeing their wives and me, like a mini-flock of nesting birds, scrabbling crabwise along on the ground looking for treasure. I hardly blamed them.)

At length, it became clear that we weren’t going to find the tiny metal box, that someone else had almost certainly gotten to it first and snapped it up instead. I was disappointed, but not terribly—I had two of my three love notes, not to mention a great game to play and a marvelous boyfriend with whom to play it, plus I had gotten to tell the whole saptastic love story to two strangers who were just lapping it up. For a storyteller, that’s a pretty excellent consolation prize.

The nice straight ladies, however, were undeterred. They questioned me further about the game, and when I mentioned that sometimes I’d had items delivered or hidden by out-of-town co-conspirators, they immediately volunteered to do that. I was agreeable, but when it turned out that they lived in Alberta (the US equivalent is roughly Oklahoma), I had to say with some regret that I didn’t think it was going to work out. The game was played between cities that we both visited with some frequency, San Francisco and Chicago being the most popular sites, but I was hard put to imagine that both of us were going to have urgent business in Medicine Hat anytime soon. With that, they wished me good luck with the game and with the boyfriend and took themselves back off into the Ferry Building, clearly delighted to have had a Real Live San Francisco Experience with a Real Live Homosexual. Very good stories for the folks back at home, this gay love story, helpfully delivered without anyone being subjected to the sight of actual homos actually kissing or anything scandalous like that.

But I got a story out of it, too. I tell it often, complete with gestures and voices and exaggerated faces (I’m told that my imitation of the husbands is pretty funny), to illustrate an experience of being seen uncomplicatedly as a queer man in the world, if only by tourists from Alberta. They were in love with the both of us, for a minute, in love with the idea of love, savoring the grand, transcontinental romance of these two boys, one of whom they were standing with, right there, in the weak morning sunshine out by the water, all of us still well-bundled in hoodies and coats.

To be honest, it’s really quite lovely to have the story to tell. I have some stories of myself being approved of in various genders by people who want to flirt, and of people recognizing me in assorted genders but being displeased or disapproving, as well as story upon story of people either wanting to flirt or to disapprove mostly
because
they couldn’t get a good, clear read on my gender. These two women from the Prairies, come to Sodom by the Bay for who knows what reason, found themselves a nice young faggot with a romantic story to approve of, become interested in, validate, and value. The weird part is that through them, somehow, so did I.

Gay Men, Queer Men, and Me

I am sitting deep in an old sofa, mostly dressed, with a naked man between my legs, his warm and furry back against my chest, his thighs draped over mine to spread his legs wide. We’re on this sofa, and not in the warm embrace of his enormous leather-sheathed bed, because he wants to
see
. He wants to see my face while I have the use of him, wants to watch his own slick asshole gulp air and grin with wanting me inside him, and the huge mirror across from the sofa does the job perfectly. I agree because he’s such a nice guy and such a hot fuck, but the visual both seduces and arraigns me: my body does not match this scene. I can enjoy pretending that his hard cock in my hands is really my own. I can tease his taint mercilessly, delightfully, never quite opening his hole with my fingertips no matter how many times I brush it, no matter how many times he hunches his hips up to encourage me. All the while I can forget that I have no balls of my own to slap and tease. But eventually, when his orgasms have finally sputtered out and the lights must, regrettably, be turned on, there I will be—sticky with lube and smelling of latex and poppers, cock in the sink. Unfortunate, unimaginable cunt underneath, all inward angles and slick wetness. I’ll make a joke (“Hang on, time to swap out attachments”) and escape to the bathroom and get all-the-way dressed, and tell myself this is all for his benefit.

Except for a few ill-advised and ultimately fruitless early-teenage fumblings, I never touched a man with any sexual intentions until I was one myself (or a near facsimile thereof). I have never had even the remotest interest in straight people of any sex or gender as sex partners; I like it queer. As a woman, as a dyke (or a near facsimile thereof), I attracted queer women—tough femmes with quicksilver grins and complicated lingerie and, later, equally tough butches with equally appealing, if simpler, undergarments. The queer thing was that I was called to other queers as like calls to like, as dragon knows dragon, and I reveled in an aesthetically queer sexuality (even when lesbo sexual mores or butch/femme cultural restrictions reared their limiting and limited heads).

But as I started to live more and more as a masculine thing, as my faggot sensibility began to crowd out my dyke history, I found myself increasingly attracted to men; to fur, to muscles, to the tang of testosterone sweat and its associated sexual hunger. Or, to be more precise: I had always been attracted to men, and I started to find myself willing to do something about that when it began to appear that I would be able to do it homo-style, the way that I preferred. Whether the man in question was the factory-direct or custom-built variety mattered far less to me than his masculinity did. My parts, whatever we were calling them, engorged at the right combination of skin and fur and ink, muscles and hard cocks standing out in varying degrees of relief; I had, and continue to have, delicious and nourishing sex and love with transmen, who are so willing to let my gender and my body be incongruent, who in fact enjoy my hybrid self. But—hesitantly and with a mouthful of apologies—I started moving into the community of gay XY men to see what I could see.

Gay XY men, generally, wanted nothing to do with me. While I didn’t quite have to endure fish jokes, neither was I ever far from them. I cruised gay XY men using all the art and craft I had acquired from the bathhouse sluts who raised me from a wee small queer thing. They were . . . befuddled, and then, increasingly, hostile. How dare I know so much—the ancient and unwritten signals, the slight and intuitive movements of
Homo erectus
—and then turn out upon closer inspection to be a, well, not a man. The XY men who had been especially interested turned on me especially viciously; they would put the word out about my quare ways and in a moment both tag me with the stigma of pussy and shame any man who imagined he might not, necessarily, mind.
How dare
I try pass myself off as a gay man?
seemed to be the insistent question. And I wasn’t trying to, quite; I wasn’t really not, either.

The problem is that I want to fuck men as a masculine thing but don’t want to be a man; I want queer XY guys to be attracted to me in their queer, masculine ways and not see me as a woman even when the body I walk and fuck around in is unequivocally female. I want to eat my cake and have it, too. It’s not at all fair, and I can hear the disapproving chorus in my head strike up a jaunty chorus of Pick a Side, Freakshow. The disapproving, however, may rest assured that I am not getting away scot-free with this gender crime (however often I do manage to, er, get off). In fact, I find myself inexorably hoisted on my own silicone petard, time after time.

I am aware that there are transmen, or men of transsexual experience, who have had no such difficulties. I am glad for them, and I am also entirely clear about the fact that I would have a far easier time fucking gay men if I embodied myself as a man; taking hormones, having chest surgery, something, anything. I did not, and still don’t. I retain all of my original equipment in unmodified format. While dressed I look, walk, and talk like a man, even (I am told) fuck like a man, but naked, I am clearly not a man.

I talk a good game. Men who are starting to be seduced by my big body and big vocabulary—which is a small and particular kind of a group already—ask, bewildered, how I can fuck like a man if I was born female. I say that I have five sizes of cock from which they can have their pick and two perfectly good paws if none of those suit. I say that while I’m behind them and cramming their asses, they won’t be able to tell I wasn’t born a man and that if they can they’re unlikely to care. Interested, they agree to dates, and I keep most of my clothes on and treat them to the kind of fuck I learned to dish out as a butch, the intuitive, thorough, masculine pounding that is wholly focused on the one getting fucked. I can, and cheerfully will, fuck for as long as they want and have no trouble about stopping when they’re finished. I am not bothered by poz guys; though I always wrap my rubber rascal in a further layer of latex, there’s no danger of it picking up anything unpleasant and no worries about it giving anyone anything, either. I make converts in my wake, alerting gay men to the pleasures of the transmasculine top and then make good my escape with my cock in my backpack and the bleach scent of cum still, sometimes, clinging to my clothes. It’s satisfying and a lot of fun, and the sex is at least as good as the pleasure of turning gay men a little queerer. The post-coital hugs are always fond; often I am invited for a repeat performance on some future day. In that cheerful frame of mind, I leave before I can be exposed—and before I can get real.

I leave every encounter aroused, both hard and wet and full of longing, fleeing home for the comfort of my flannel sheets and trusty, gender-free hands. I am full of longing to be seen, touched, taken in as what I am in the fullness of my complicated body and extremely peculiar identity, to be met, and welcomed. To feel sure that my partner’s interest isn’t dependent on my scrupulous attention to eliminating any chance of unmasking would be a relief; the idea that a gay man might desire the body in which I live is almost unimaginable. And at the same time, this is safe: all of the demons and dangers of my anatomy—my fat, my unreliable body—are kept hidden in these encounters. I know that I am trading a kind of legitimacy for a kind of safety, in the exact way that I (and so many transmasculine things) have learned to frame a shirtless photo just exactly to the armpits. It isn’t a true reflection, nor a whole one, but it is reassuring. To all parties.

I am as hopeful as I am afraid that one day, one of these tempting, handsome non-transmen is going to persist in trying to touch me; it’s a fantasy as much as a nightmare. There’s no part of me able to trust that this complicated body with all its speed bumps and dead ends will remain a viable route once someone is seriously considering setting off on it, when all the limitations are so visible.

I am painting myself into my own corner, every time. Telling an XY guy, “You’ll never know the difference,” means, always, making damn sure he doesn’t. It means that taking off my jacket and hat is as much undressing as I can do. As much as I have enjoyed fucking a delicious naked person of any sex or gender while I’m dressed down to my boots, tie only slightly askew, this compulsory clothedness feels somehow different, as though without volition the experience turns on its axis to stonewall rather than welcome me. All the while, I think about what it would be like to take off the rest of my clothes. I wonder about how, or whether, that could happen. I imagine being curled up with an appealing man in a dim room, the both of us sweaty and sleepy, having been invited to sleep there and sort out the mess on the floor in the morning. Skin against skin, roaming hands, and maybe a long and promising kiss before the images flicker out, like the end of the reel, a flapping nuisance in a square of white light. My hindbrain, protective as ever of my tender heart, will not allow this. It is clear (even if I am ambivalent) about how such evenings must end, whether or not they actually take place in the evening.

We’ll see. I’m young enough yet, and the world changes day by day, and certainly in it there are the correct perverts to match my particular desires if I am patient and make a space for them to appear. They are probably not on
manhunt.net,
but that’s all right, as I may not be quite ready for them yet, either. Those encounters and their cousins of genesis have their own pleasures, and I am loath to relinquish them. I love the opening of bodies as much as I love the opening of minds, and any opportunity I have to climb inside someone and move things around a bit is as rewarding as it has ever been, which is plenty. I will keep pushing my greasy thumbs into assholes and laughing at exclamations of surprise, keep recommending
The Leather Daddy and the Femme
to my tricks, and keep making jokes at my own expense while I, armed with my trusty array of Doc Johnson wonder wangs, initiate yet another gay XY man into a queer place of desire where people born girls don’t always grow up to be women and sometimes end up sweet-talking bears with agreeably sized hands and no compunctions about using them on you, buddy. And also . . .

Also, I will think about the next act, the one that happens after the yelling and impact I’m so comfortable with, the act in which Our Hero pulls hir head out of hir ass (and hir hands out of everyone else’s). The one that may or may not be possible but is nonetheless a possibility. To prove it, I have written an essay all about it. Maybe next time I’ll skip promising him that he’ll never know the difference. Maybe next time, I’ll set about making
sure
he knows how the differences are at work. We’ll see.

It’s Always Easier If You Can Be Something
They Recognize

My dear friend Malcolm is one of the kindest men I have ever had the good fortune to know, and also one of the more nontraditionally gendered (which, by the way, is saying something). I don’t mean to suggest a secret eyeliner jones or a shoe fetish—most of the time, Malcolm’s a Dockers kind of a guy, though he does occasionally rock a leather kilt. Nor am I saying he “wouldn’t hurt a fly.” He would, and to tell you the truth, if push came to shove, he’d be more use to you than I would, between his amazing ability to talk any topic into cowering submission and his lifetime of advanced martial arts training. No, what I mean is that Malcolm is almost entirely interior and almost entirely noncompetitive (unless you hand him the controls of a PlayStation), and that this pair of qualities, though it has otherwise contributed to a very excellent life, have made it hard for him at times to get jobs.