Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

by Andrea Lawlor

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.

Stop Violence Against Gays and Lesbians Now! the sign read. “Too much?” Christopher said. He looked worried. “Should it be ‘Lesbians and Gays’?” “Not too much enough,” Paul said. “What about ‘Queers Bash Back’?” “But we don’t want to advocate violence as a response,” said Christopher. “We don’t want to alienate people.” “I do,” said Paul, more and more awake. “Fuck those queer-bashers. Fuck all those fucking breeders. Write that!” “Jesus, Paul.” “What? They don’t worry about alienating us when they’re beating the crap out of some baby drag queen.”

“Think about it,” said Paul. “When women cover songs by men, they don’t swap the pronouns. Is this a.) a lack of anxiety about convention, b.) a biologically essential fluidity native to humans with vaginas and/or two X chromosomes, c.) rampant queerness among women singers, or d.) the universal male default?”

Hip hop uses samples as material from which to make art, whereas rock uses covers to foreground identity, performance itself the art.

Paul gathered a bouquet of small pretty sticks and flowers while Polly made a ring of stones and piled thick branches high in the middle. She lit the fire, and they leaned next to each other against a bench of fallen tree trunk.

Draw?

A flâneur, he walked from the bus station to Boystown, miles up North Halsted, looking for the gays. After an hour or so, the low-slung warehouses and scrubby lots dissolved into juice bars and vintage clothing franchises, and Paul knew he was close.

He wondered if he was stronger now, or if he just looked stronger, like a gym bunny.

There is a type of person, man or woman, who will approach Paul on the street and ask him straight out to identify himself. They’ll say: What are you, Hispanic? Ay-rab? or Are you a boy or a girl? Paul is accustomed to these reactions, these ministrations; his body is public property, his face a test.

Paul chopped his pile of carrots carefully, languishing in the sad earnestness of the woman who was driving away from something upsetting in a fast car, the one who was closer to being fine, the one for whom life was like a brook, and all the others, those amber divas of lesbian melancholy so different from his gayboy ideas of women who were every woman, women for whom no mountain was too high, women who remembered the ways things were.

A bookstore was really no different from a bar, Paul thought when he arrived, ten minutes before anyone else scheduled for the night shift. More public, better lit, but the same seaside question of what might wash up today.

Paul liked to pick out the secretly cool people, people too cool to flash their coolness. The cool people were not always or even usually the same as the shiny people. Often someone shiny was too conventionally good-looking to be cool but they were still compelling, in terms of sheer wattage. Paul knew he wasn’t good-looking enough to be shiny, but he could be cool in certain contexts. Cool was relational and conceptual; cool took work, cool was a meritocracy which, with all its flaws, he still preferred to the aristocracy of genetics.