It’s distasteful to admit that breaking the taboo did something for me back then, when I was still ignorant of the problems that being gay can cause. But when I first started dating L, I quickly discovered that more thrilling than holding her hand in public, appalling the religious, or feeling superior to heterosexuals was being able to say the words my girlfriend.
The pleasure this elicited came from someplace old, older than the adolescent urge to shock or infuriate. Saying my girlfriend produced the satisfaction of a child declaring their age, right down to the month, for the benefit of an inquiring adult (“Seven and three-quarters!”). I was not one of those little girls who wanted to get married; the phantom I was supposed to have been would likely have spoken of her future husband the way I say my girlfriend today, which remains: bashful, arch, incredulous, smug.
Venturing into a new kind of homosexuality is fun, especially when you can do it with your friends. Last night, I went with two other t boys to one of those grimy gay bars where you can drink cheaply, cruise in the dark, and sometimes get robbed. We stood around in a basement more sewer than grotto gossiping with each other and chatting with wasted guys, barely making it home in time for dawn.
In my experience of transness, public life is a paranoid arithmetic: how clocky am I alone? How clocky am I with Jade (less clocky as trans, it turns out, but whether I’ll read as a man or a butch woman is 50/50)? How clocky am I with my trans friends, all of us comprising a spectrum of passability that bloats like yeast, then implodes like a star, recombinant as DNA and inverted as we are, with every lightshift, jacket removal, gesture? Who knows.
At some point in the night, a tall white man approached us, too drunk to stand up straight. I’ve been married for forty years, he announced, and I just realized I’m bisexual.
Female-socialized as the three of us supposedly are, we smiled and cooed. That’s nice, I simpered. Congratulations, S lisped.
But the man was despairing, looking back over the lost years, hand to his forehead, high above mine. I’m bisexual, he soldiered on, and I need support!
The three of us shifted our eyes. You should drink some water, babe, I said. J, always effortlessly masculine, tapped the man’s shoulder with an open hand.
The man stumbled off, having been gently made aware that we weren’t offering what he was looking for. My hilarity—how bisexual can you be if you zeroed in on us, sis?—was a soft landing for my bitterness. My conscience said: Everyone deserves love and support, and the closet is a brutal shame. But my life was its rejoinder.
It’s raining today. Out late, up late. Instead of doing what needs to be done, I did nothing, until I went out for the ingredients for tonight’s dinner with Jade and a few friends. On Manhattan and Greenpoint, I remembered that I needed to supplement the pair of beautiful ceramic dishes a dear friend made for me, unless I wanted to serve my guests from pots and colanders. I got three bowls—two matching white, one angular and lined in blue—at the 99¢ Discount.
Groceries and bowls in hand, I sat outside a cafe near my apartment with a book (Zain Khalid’s remarkable Brother Alive) to wait for Jade. She arrived flecked in rain, like perfect fruit.
I got bowls! I pronounced.
Jade laughed. In her tote were a pair of beautiful ceramic dishes, because she knew I needed them. Then she was off to her tattoo appointment, fruit stung for beauty’s sake.
I’ve noticed the small and intentional reclamation of lover, that I’ve been predicting for a few years, has started taking place. I love it—love the word lover, and how gay people use it. I use it occasionally myself, and suppose that if it really does have a moment, even just among a wedge of New York-adjacent dykes, that I’ll use it even more. But while it feels good to say—a hearkening back to beloved gay people I’ll never know—it’s not my girlfriend. It can’t be.
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