serendipity and further adventures in hell's bathroom [pt. 1]

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[slightly revised]

I didn't know that it was Blog Against Heteronormativity Day, but I couldn't have chosen a better day after for having taken a girl dressed as a boy to the bar.

Some weeks ago a friend of mine expressed a desire to dress up in drag and go to the gay bar. Among other things, she said she wanted to see if women really were as fucked over as she thought.

Last week she pointed out to me on the phone that we'd never done this (and also never done mock posh, sigh. Though I have hopes.) Uncharacteristically, I said, "All right, how about Friday?"

So last night she came over. She brought her own cargoes and t-shirt, and we put my bar shirt on her--the one some lovely people gave me in Vancouver one time, black, shiny, with the grommets up the front. That all worked pretty damn well.

She also stopped off at London Drugs for that essential friend and foe of this particular crossing, the tensor bandage. Me, I used a lumbar support belt, but that's a more long-term investment.

She has very long hair, so we tried various things -- balled up under my leather cap, biker loose; we finally settled on a braid down the back of her shirt, with the collar of the bar shirt covering it.

"This is wicked uncomfortable." she said. 'Tis.

She wasn't convinced that her face was passable, so we made a run upstairs. Thanks, stitchinmyside for the mascara. We managed to create a pretty decent lip weasel and general manginess.

This intense switching of signals, then and later, was fascinating and disconcerting for her. "I look like a fourteen-year-old boy who thinks he looks hott, but really, no," she pointed out. Which is more or less what we all look like when we start out, so she's in good company, anyway.

Walking over, I asked her how she was feeling, and she said she felt very exposed. She kept evaluating how people were perceiving her and what their reactions were.

It's been less than a year since I had top surgery, but I'd already forgotten that feeling, which she described so precisely. You're always wondering -- how is that person reading me? Are they confused? Are they hostile? Are they going to stare? Say something? Threaten me? Ignore me? Flirt bizarrely? (See chromemagpie's stories about teenage girls thinking he was a Cute Boy, which he is, but one rather too old for them.

She was lucky to have a relatively low voice, so that wasn't going to immediately get her read. That was always my problem.

[End Part One]

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