The Fixed Stars

by Molly Wizenberg

I stare at people, forgetting that they might see me staring and think it’s rude. It’s not that I think they can’t see me; it’s that I do not think at all.

I’d never been with a woman. What if the view would be different there—different in ways I couldn’t imagine, like the view from a galaxy a billion light-years away? Constellations, after all, are a trick of perspective.

So I do this whole archeological dig on myself, comb through every story of every person I’ve ever wanted or dated or loved, looking for glimmers of gayness.

What if the one constant thing about you is that you’re changeable?

This was a new intimacy: the pleasure of sameness.

She was a heat I wanted to be inside, a hot bath.

What is queer sex, if not a throwing-off of everything that isn’t desire?

When I was straight, I did not have to come out. Like my white skin, my being straight was a convenient default.

But queerness should really make us realize that the common thread is only that we are all unique. And our sexuality is personal and specific, and it can evolve, just as we do in non-sexual ways.

Androgyny is not gender’s absence; it’s the negotiation made visible.