My gender performance: San Francisco 1998

(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 fostered member the lesbian community, like the ancient Celtic hero mentored by master women warriors. For my birthday I was feted by friends at one of these performances.

My hair groomed into a short ponytail, and four-in-hand knot pinning my button-down collar, I straddled a metal folding chair in the dancehall sized room, part of a spiralling circle of queer butch femme trans womyn arrayed in the glittery glamory of the night. 

Through strumming music, faintly medieval, seductive, percussive, metallic, thick, I was initiated into a mysterious erotic affirmation of my beginning journey, anointed by the attention of the dark eyed femme who opened the evening's show with a post feminist strip tease. 

After claiming the arena with her body, arms and legs, limbs and torso gyring a ritual center, drawing in our focus, she strode directly toward me.

Art and desire are sacred twins. That holy night I embarked across a deep water, through mist and shadow.