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My gender performance: Ohio 1968

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(Urbana, Ohio—1968) A red pair of Chucks All Stars, Hot Wheels, The Hardy Boys and television shows like Bonanza and Gunsmoke informed my sense of identity then. I named myself Frank, after the elder Hardy brother. When that didn't stick, I adopted the name George under the pretext that I had a crush on the boy by that name in my class at South Ward Elementary. I knew I was a boy, had understood since well before kindergarten. But as I got older, resistance started coming from the women in charge of raising me. They didn't understand: my mom and my babysitter, Auntie Garnet.  Auntie Garnet began insisting that I wear a shirt in the summer. The group of kids who spent our lazy, sunny days out of school in the grass of Auntie Garnet's backyard fit easily into our roles pretending attacks on enemy forts from behind hedges and competing for champion bee catcher in the clover. Then came the day my friend Larry told me that a club for only the boys had formed and I wasn't all...
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My gender performance: San Francisco 1998

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(San Francisco—1998) After a year and a half of pandemic isolation, as Seattle opens up, I've been feeling nostalgic for streetlife and nightlife. The arts of gender expression blossom at night, on burlesque stages and in sex club honeycombs. The late 90s scene in the Castro and SOMA districts of San Francisco, post Act-UP and Queer Nation, was inflected by nascent technologies creating community electronically. Along the new Internet, colonies and cultures of like-minded souls connected exponentially. Like the night, this was a secluded dimension where we could present and explore our gendered, sexual selves more honestly and fully. Decades after displaying my masculinity on stage with glued-on whiskers and  a rolled up tube sock in my crotch, I began my whole and true transition, in the pre-millennial zeitgeist of Market Street and the Mission. The Mission District's Women's Building hosted community events, including womyns' cabarets. I thought of myself as a fostere...
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My gender performance: Ohio 1978

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(Springfield, Ohio—1978) Scrolling Facebook last night, I saw myself 43-years-ago, grinning from an event post for a drag show that happened last week. It spoke to me about history. There were, in the 1970s, tiny, shadowy bars in seedy neighborhoods of midwestern towns where it felt safe to be me. With my best friend and partner in deviance, I learned to perform my gender. Rock and I felt like soul mates when we bonded in high school. Seconds after graduation, we were pushing into the unknown of adulthood with fierce determination to break the small town chains that held us back from our dreams. Saturday nights, Rock and I would go out into the world, and declare our freedom. Rock, shimmering lips and eyes, dancing in delicate tunics that feminized his sharp angles. Me, bristling, mustachioed, in rolled up flannel sleeves and a bandana flagged out of my jeans. For drinks and tips, but mostly for the feeling, we interpreted Linda Ronstadt and Bruce Springsteen anthems of life and love, ...
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Truth Comes Home

There will be times when the truth comes home, rumpled and needing a shave, as the darkness is peetering out like cold coffee and there's no time to sleep before the next day. Truth will come home sometimes with a grin eager for bacon and eggs and the air will be pregnant with ionic promise and then love, bread, and time, and plans will be made. Then other times the truth will come home only in whispers of hope, in the absence and emptiness of some future moment, in the garden of evening's cool, green shade.
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