El Diablo Está En Mi Bigote del Fuego

It was a festive weekend of folderol and faggotry. I traveled with my nancyboy and the Cuntry Kings of Durham, NC to the great, unrelentingly hot, city of Austin to watch them perform their glittery magic at Freakshow-a-Go-Go.

The sum of the gender presentations there was greater than their holes. There were versions of humanity I hadn’t known existed before, beta-versions of neo-tranny perhaps, untried until that night but there for your assimilation, should you be so inclined. Only in a Dot Com city like Austin would the people trot out some just-constructed transware for the delectation of the masses. Be careful what you download, Friend, you may find your commitment to some aspect of yourself blurring or disappearing entirely.

I joined up with my friend Archer, a super hot gay man with a queer spirituality and sensibility, to watch the burlesque of tap-dancing, cat-identified, klezmer-benders. We’re the same age, meaning: twice everyone else’s, and had the same sense of our gay corset being unlaced. “The kids are bringing the next thing,” he observed, “and it’s beautiful to watch.” We talked about the spiritual evolution of trans, how we’re not really “male” or “female” spiritually, and these kids know it. Or at least, they embody (literally) this evolution intuitively.

Archer and I were in a “spiritual community” (or The Cult, as I called it, to watch the elders panic) together, and we were shown the truth of this, that there is no gender in greater consciousness. What I call “God” doesn’t have a body, much less a gender, and neither do you, Mamsirmam. The kids are breaking it down, but as Arch and I noted, the rest of the world feels slooooow on the uptake. If we would stop slamming triple lattes and chicken fingers for a second and breathe, we might discover the new taste in town is trans and it’s already in our mouths.*

At some tender point in the evening, Arch looked at me plaintively and asked “would a transguy be interested in a guy like me?” No matter who we are, or what’s in our pants or head, we’re sure we’re no-one will like us. He loves the t-guys. I had to be an asshole and bait him: “How would you feel about being with a man with no dick?” – because I wonder myself, laboring under the prejudice that all gay men are dick-identified and cock-centric, but he doesn’t disappoint. He walks the talk, and will take pussy with the cock – as he pointed out, this body is just a dream anyway.

He went further and asked me if I’d be in a relationship with a non-trans guy. My knee-jerk is “of course!” because that’s my Sagittarian party line: commit to everything and everything is possible. He’s my kind of gay - rugged, whiskered, un-edited. My aversion to the gay male is that too-tidy, tip-toed presentation, the uber-manicured, depilated, skin peel gay. Maybe this is because I can’t even approach tidy myself, I don’t even have baseline tidy. I am physiologically incapable of keeping a neat appearance; my shirttail will untuck, my soup will slop, my tie will skew, and my hair will awry. Thus it has always been. Neat and pressed is not a look I admire in others either, so good for me.

But a rough, rugged, dirty man? Hells yes! I think that a relationship with a man might be achievable, if I’m more of a man myself. I’ve always liked sexy-times with the mens but the off-screen power imbalance was more than I could stand, and so a relationship was out of the question. The implied superiority of the male does not elicit a hardon for me, and if you’re thinking “what ‘implied superiority’?” about your own relationship with your guy, then you are not paying attention. But if I am a guy, maybe parity is possible; therefore maybe love would be too.

So keep on taking us higher, Children of the Corndog. You, with your Heidi wig and your soft-packer poking askew from directly below your belly where it should not be, I bid you take me by my hand to this begendered Eden where you, and your second-bedroom-now-walk-in-closet, reside. Let us recline together like Cats on Broadway in a softly warming sun, and stretch like snakes in springtime and burst our skins. Crinolines and neckties will spill out of these rents, like entrails from a hope chest, only we don’t need hope, see, we have it, and it’s wearing your mom’s vintage cocktail dress and your daddy’s suspenders. If you were blind, and you felt it, your description would vary to a man. But everyone who feels it and describes it can say emphatically “that’s mine.”


*for some of us, trans is exactly what’s stuffed in our delighted mouths right now. Lucky us.