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Stupid queen, thought Paul. All who see me tonight will know I am a girl.
I am being penetrated by punk,
He liked the writer’s books; they weren’t clever, but offered man realness, the authenticity of the sensitive country boy, a view inside the inscrutable straight-guy mind—unexpected, like a talking dog.
The visiting writer snorted through his beard. “We’re all going to die,” he said. “Yeah,” said Paul, embarrassed to be caught out in gothicness.
All the queers who weren’t as lucky as Paul.
“Nothing. He’s old. He’s like thirty.”
She didn’t have any of the obvious signs of Midwestern lesbianism (labrys jewelry, Indigo Girls tee shirts, softball haircut)
If you had to fall in love with (by which Paul meant have sex with)
In every single person in the elevator he looked for something he could, if not love, fetishize.
the elevator Paul just as often imagined the hand-holding, the running down the rainy street with, his hot palm on the striped shoulder of some boy, the being cruised, the reading Proust to, the picnicking, the kissing, the eating takeout, the spending the day in a borrowed bed—not that anyone needed to know that.
Dallas might be a drug-dealing skateboard punk rocker right now, but at heart he was an American, at heart he was a normal straight boy. He’d cover all his tattoos with a suit at his Texas wedding. Paul wouldn’t even be invited. Paul was repulsive, apart from the human flow of life; Paul was sitting alone outside waiting for a ride that would never come.
Paul thought about his asshole opening up into a cathedral and the smell of the wall and this feeling of being a federation of so many cosmic particles suspended in skin.
The minute he had confirmation (besides his own gaydar) that a subject was a homosexual, Paul compulsively searched for the flaws in that person’s gender.
Paul was never very good at having friends. If he liked someone enough to get to know them, he’d want to suck their cocks or even just make out after weeks of prolonged staring.
Paul is sex, he is effortlessly sexual, effortlessly masculine.
Paul is accustomed to these reactions, these ministrations; his body is public property, his face a test.
We live in a desert of androgynous softball players. A butchless desert.”
“It’s darling,” said Jane, and immediately experienced a spasm of impostor shame. She knew she camped it up around Paul, and wondered if he camped it up around her, if they were anxious collaborators in a consolidation of something supposedly shared rather than actual friends.
How could straight people, for instance, have real friends when their entire lives were an inhabitation of a myth?
“I love camping,” said Jane, with alienating sincerity. She was sort of outdoorsy, Paul realized, as perhaps were all lesbians at heart. How was he going to pass for two entire weeks in the woods?
“Actually, I’m pretty sure my friend ditched me too,” Paul said. “Then we’ll just have to hang out,” said Diane, and Paul felt a flutter of shyness, a shy girl flutter, the flutter of not knowing if he was making a friend or something else. This was a strange experience for him, for whom all were prey, and he located the feeling in his new body. He was now having girl-feelings. Weird.
and Paul realized—again—they were all women. They were all women, except him, including him. No one was looking at him strangely. He was being paranoid. He was a girl, just like these girls.
“No,” said Diane. “I mean you smell like a girl all the time. You didn’t smell like a boy before. You can’t fake pheromones. I think you’re really female. Like, chemically or something.” “That’s cool,” said Paul. “I think that must be true.” “Did you always know you were a girl?” Diane asked. The waitress came back, took their order, and left. Paul thought. Had he always been a girl?—
“Oh yes,” she said. “As long as it’s permanently unclear what it means, I’ve always been a girl.”
He felt the old desperation. What if he couldn’t get out of this town again, was somehow trapped here while all the other fun people were hanging out together somewhere else?
Paul didn’t understand that. What was sex but newness? And sensation and conquest and intrigue and desire and romance and fantasy, and specific people sometimes, sure, but not always.
Heterosexuality = marriage = death, Paul knew.
He’d begun The Price of Salt earlier in the trip, and now finished it, tearfully, right as the bus crossed the Bourne Bridge.
Diane was as fascinatingly blank as any man. And as frustrating. A shiny reflective surface and Paul a magpie.
You’ll stretch it! he thought helplessly when she’d borrowed his shirt that morning, but no, better, he’d sacrifice his shirts for her. He’d wear the stretched-out shirt thinking Diane’s body was here and I am now inside the space she left, I fit myself inside her shape.
He could tell she liked that he was girlier than her, liked that she was so much bigger than him, liked to do little things for him, but sometimes he did wonder if she liked liking what she liked.
His life was superficial, surfaces to be polished and re-seen.
Was he already intruding on their gender? Maybe, but it was his too, right? His body did whatever he wanted, so he belonged in all the genders.
“You want to be everything, all the time,” Diane said. Her voice caught. “I just want a girlfriend. I’m afraid you’re going to get bored of being a girl, and then where will I be?”
“Seriously,” she said. “Seriously, I know you. You even said it yesterday, how mutable you are. What happens in five years, a year even? It’s in your nature. I don’t want to keep you from your nature.”
He was not enough for Diane, was not right and could never be right by virtue of his very malleability, was not right because he could make himself right?
He huddled into himself on a bench, face in his crossed arms. What if Diane knew about his activities last night, yesterday afternoon? How he’d been a boy, gotten sucked off as a boy, cum as a boy, walked through the heart of gay San Francisco as the simultaneous subject and object of the male gaze—nothing she could share; he was unrecognizable as her lover. Paul couldn’t understand desire that could be turned off, a circuit breaker routed through particular body forms. He’d imagined Diane as a boy, and loved her.
The counter girl must have thought he was cool enough to live with Ruffles, and a proud calm infused Paul’s body.
“He’s gone, Paul. He died last night.”
He was exhausted and broke from being so queer,
How do you know if you like something because the corporate radio brainwashers want you to like it or because it’s actually good and you have an internal sense of what’s good, which is a sign of your essential worth as a person?
