A strange moment

I was heading out to see a friend last night and was walking down Castro Street --not in the finest of moods, I grant; the day's heat was really uncomfortable-- and coming up toward me was a male and sorta female couple. As they got closer the feminine person, whose babbling I could hear from half a block away and who looked and dressed mostly like a female but had something of the bone structure of a man, looked up at me and stopped talking right in mid-word, with a kind of scared and shocked look on her face. I kept going and wondered what had happened. Had my internal dislike of the drag queen turned into a scowl at a stranger? I forget sometimes that at 6'1" and 200 lbs with a big tattoo and a tanktop, I can be intimidating to littler people.

I acknowledge that I am quite sensitive to the imbalance between masculine and feminine energy in many gay men. And my neighborhood is something of a pressure cooker for that. People come here precisely so that they can be really gay. But it brought to mind again the fatalistic assessment of Mr Donovan that gayness is inescapeably bound up with deformed masculinity and deformed femininity. And my own irritated suspicion that many "gay" men have a primary issue with their gender identity, with sexual attraction choice is either secondary or an outcome of the primary problem.

B used to call the Castro "Chinatown" and he had no love for it. By the time we met, I was well on that page with him. Although he was no swaggering dude, he was clearly --and pretty damn wonderfully-- a regular guy. I think he was even more deeply put off by all the gay stuff than he was willing to admit and any association with that group --sometimes me?--made him profoundly uncomfortable. (Puzzlingly, though, his best friend --a kneejerk gay liberal--wrote a book about the female comic book superheroines he is obsessed with and makes dolls of them. Opposites do attract, I guess. Never could figure that one out.)

I had my own profoundly uncomfortable moment. Although I really don't like drag queen types, I don't plan to make a career of scowling at them in the street. That should be saved for the ACLU and Greenpeace and Prop8 activists who constantly bother the neighborhood. But archetypes are not amenable to transient social change. (That's my hesitation about gays trying to fit into the archetypally heterosexual institution of marriage.) So I wondered if, no matter how clear I am that I am a man, the mere fact of being involved in homosexuality calls that status into question.