Episode One:

Okay, I’ll be your man.

It’s voting day. We find our super heroine at the polls. The voting booths have been set up in a common house of God. The church is white and small, nothing grand, nothing catholic. It’s simple, a non-aesthetically pleasing rectangular building that could’ve just as easily been a doctor’s office, except for the sign out front designating it holy ground.
As she passes the greeter, the white haired man hiding his balding head with a Korean War Veteran’s baseball cap, she knows that he’s probably thinking she’s a boy. Her super power is androgyny.
She walks with a little more entitlement. She takes up a little more space.

I only know what I see.

I stepped into the church to vote for the next Governor of Florida. I’d just recently moved and I didn’t know where my new precinct voted. An older woman sat under the sign designating the letter of the alphabet that applies to my name, “K”.
“This young man doesn’t know where he needs to vote.” The volunteer shouted across the room.
She was the kind of woman you want to imagine when you think of the stereotypical grandmother baking you a batch of clichéd chocolate chip cookies. Even still, it’s always a little unsettling, at first, to be a woman, and hear yourself referred to with masculine pronouns, no matter how sweet the voice that it comes from.
I could’ve said, “I’m a woman” and I have before, but I didn’t. Because it didn’t bother me that she mistook me for a boy, as long as she didn’t know that I was really a woman. In fact, under the right circumstances it could be really hot.
I pulled my shoulders in to disguise my breasts even more than the sports bra already did. If she’d discovered her mistake then we’d both have a reason to be embarrassed. Her, because she’d feel like she insulted a stranger, and me, because she’d feel that she’d insulted me.
“Your driver’s license?” She asked.
Fear ran up my belly and into my chest, because I knew we were about to have “a moment,” me and this stranger. I handed her my driver’s license and waited for the look of shock that would surely spread across her thinning skin when she realized her mistake. At this point I’d moved past worry and felt a little smug, a child with a secret. I held back a little giggle watching her write down my name in the box at the end of the list of computer printed names “Christa Kreimendahl.” She looked up at me.
“Do you need help?” Another volunteer interrupted.
“No,” she smiled at me. “This young man just moved here. I added him to the list. Now, honey, you go right over there, and that gentleman will give you some paperwork to fill out.”
In semi-shock, I moved down the row of volunteers to the gentleman with my paperwork. That sweet woman had looked at my driver’s license, wrote down my name, and still only believed what she saw, and what she saw was a young man.

Episode Two:

A Canadian Dream

Ana, the fierce Vancouver fashionista whose super powers include her ability to appear unquestionably straight, confided in our heroine a dream. She’d dreamt there was a man, and she knew him only in her dream. They had memories of a life together. After dinner, the man asked her if she remembered the paintings she’d painted of him. He pulled each one of them out of ether.
    “Yes!” She did. “I remember when I painted these paintings of you.”
    Only when she looked at them carefully, Ana saw that she had painted a woman. Yet somehow, the woman was the man.

One of Her Own

    “That’s because she’s not a lesbian.”
That’s the reason my friend Ana gave me for why I had been mistaken for the opposite sex. Yes, of course that’s it, the confused woman had not been a lesbian and therefore was unable to pick up on the subtle clues that I was indeed a woman and not a boy. It’s a queer thing.
Some queer life takes place in a bar. Maybe not as much now as back in the day, but it’s still significant. Other establishments, like the gay coffee shop slash bookstore on Howard Ave., usually don’t last long before they close down. There are also occasional happenings, special times, Pride which is the anniversary of Stonewall, Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, dances at the Gulfport Casino, a protest at the Hillsborough County Commission. However, every weekend you can find other gay people in a queer bar.
Even though I don’t drink or do drugs, for social reasons, I occasion the bars. Last Friday was one of those nights. I went alone to listen to a musician. The bar is called The Hideaway. They claim to be the oldest lesbian bar in the state of Florida. It’s a dirty little place. Two pool tables stuffed into one half of the building. A square shaped bar squeezed into the other half. The chairs around the bar are faux leather swivel chairs with a full back. They’re so tightly placed next to each other that when you try to rotate yourself out from the bar, to let’s say use the restroom, you can’t help but become intimate with your neighbor, legs on top of legs, a knee cramming into a thigh.
When I sat down in one of the few available seats I could feel the history alive. I was sitting in a seat that generations of dykes had sat in. Not to mention smoked in. The Hideaway is one of the few bastions of smoker friendly bars. Even with the door open to the outside the smoke is overwhelming. I concluded that a couple of days or so off my life span is a small price to pay to sit in a room knowing that every woman there loves pussy.
The seat I chose was perfect, directly in front of me was the musician. She didn’t have a stage or a band. It was just her, her electric acoustic guitar, a microphone and one amplifier.
During intermission I made my way over to a woman who was selling shirts and cds. I’d noticed her, I thought she was the most attractive woman in the bar, and that’s not really saying much. The Hideaway is the place that seasoned drinking lesbians go to. They have the faces of women who have lived hard. She was in her late thirties with dirty blonde hair, thin.
There was a woman already talking to her. She had dark hair pulled back into a ponytail. She’d been drinking quite a bit. I’d seen her knock back two Jell-O shots and drink about three beers. I wouldn’t have considered her feminine, no, she was a little butch with long hair, certainly a top. She sees me before I can even talk to the merchandise woman.
“Who’s this curly top boi?” She asks, or at least that’s what I think she asks, but instead she asked, “Who’s this curly top boy?” Turning to the merchandise woman who I was just about to hit on she said, “That’s your son, isn’t it?”
“That’s a lady.” The blonde corrected her.
I punctuated her statement by grabbing my tits.
“I’m so sorry” She grabbed my arm the way alcoholics do when they want your undivided attention “I’m so sorry.” Her face was earnest.
“That’s okay” I said. “I embrace my androgyny”
She grabbed me again “I’m really sorry.”
I didn’t feel so embracing all of the sudden. It was the severance of this woman’s face as she apologized to me.

“How old are you?” asked the Blonde.
“26.”
“I’m 40 well 39. I guess I could be your mother.”
“We don’t even look alike.”
“No.”

I did the math on my way back to my seat. She would have had to have been a pregnant 14, possible. My calculations complete and my ass in the seat, a pack of the boys came in. Four of them, they’d stopped in from the guy bar next door, The Haystack. They came in yelling for Jell-O shots. I looked over at them and one of the guys gave me a wink.


Episode Three:

    One of The Boys?

“That’s it!” My friend Karin told me the next day. “People are so stupid. There were some really butch women there, right?”
“Yeah.”
“They just put out that male energy directly. Then they see you. When people can’t figure you out, when they can’t put you in a category. You’re like a gay guy cause you’re more feminine than masculine.”
Hmmm…

Star Buckaroo

    I am a barista at Starbucks.
The cute bi-girl with the gigantic round cork in her earlobe stretching it unnaturally is infatuated with me because she thinks I look like Bob Dylan. She laments that we, again, will not work together because her shift is ending as mine begins.
    “They’re trying to keep us apart.” She teases me.
    Bastards, I think, but I just smile at her.
    Moments after she leaves, an extremely young and extremely skinny gay boy with his entourage of teenage fag hags, depart the mall and enter my Starbucks. I watch him whisper something to one of the girls while he eyes me. I think he is telling her that I am a lesbian. But he isn’t.
    “He’s so cuuuute!” He keeps saying out loud. “I think we should stay here a few more minutes.”
    They all sit together and he continues to send sexual messages to me telepathically VIA his eyeballs. Again, I hear “He’s SO cute!” The girls giggle at him and his boldness.
    I’m flattered, really, that this cute young guy would think that I am so attractive. After all, I apparently do look like a young Bob Dylan. I mean aren’t queer boys the most superficial of all of us humans?
    “Byyyee!” He calls to me as he saunters out, back into the mall.

    “Ce Ce” I tell my friend “I got hit on by a queer boy today”
    “That’s ridiculous!” She tells me. “You have GOT to embroider your name on your apron so this will STOP!”
Episode Four:

More from the Canadians

    In Toronto there was Rose, a 47 year-old playwright and a fiction writer, a neurotic beautiful mess. “Mad” is what she calls herself.
    She took our heroine to a play called Matilde, a French play about a woman, of the same name, getting out of prison for sleeping with a 15 year-old boy. Afterwards she took our heroine home and perhaps she imagined being Matilde.

    “I’m sending you a poem I wrote,” she told me, on the phone, in her over the top, breathy Marilyn-esque way. “It’s about androgyny.”
    Rose’s poem, like lots of others things about her, is highly erotic. It’s about the speaker being turned on by a woman, who upon first appearances, looks like a boy, but knowing all along that underneath her clothes, hidden, is the same sex that the speaker has, and it’s that that gets her so hot.

In Front of The Lord in The Seven-Eleven

    Sometimes I smoke a cigar. “The spirits like Tobacco,” I read in an anthropology book about tribal hallucinogens and DNA.
    When I purchase a cigar I am not uppity about it at all, I buy a Dutch Boy from the seven-eleven on Davis Island. I go there enough to be friendly with one of the male clerks. He grows and sells lilies. Occasionally, he hangs them in the store so people can buy them.
    On this day there is a new guy. He has a scruffy red beard. I tell him the cigar I wish to buy and he asks me for my ID. I’m used to this because I look so young.
    “No fuckin’ way!” He calls out when he reads my drivers license. I smile as if to say Yeah, I know. Crazy isn’t it?
    Then he calls to the male clerk who grows lilies “No fuckin’ way this dude is older than me! This guy’s older than me?” He wants to show the flower guy my ID but flower guy just walks by uncomfortably. He knows I’m a woman and he’s embarrassed.
    I’m not. I’m shocked. Again, someone has looked at my driver’s license and still insists on making me a boy. And once again, I find myself rounding in my shoulders so that the red bearded kid will not notice my breasts, realize his mistake and apologize to me.
    Apologizing to me would mean that there was something wrong with me. That the biggest insult you could give to a woman would be to say she looks like a man.

No Apology Necessary

    I prefer the reaction given to me by the teenage girl working at Target.

    I had a handful of clothes to try on, and no one was stationed at the dressing rooms. On top of that, all the doors were locked. I waited patiently while the young clerk took her time to walk over to me.
    “I want to try these on.” I told her.
    “Give me a second.” She replied in a flipped voice. The clerk unlocked the men’s dressing room and looked at me with her hello! Asshole face Are you there? “THIS is the MEN’S room.” She told me, obviously annoyed.
    “Okay.” I said unemotionally. “But I need the women’s room.”
    “Oh.” The clerk marched over to the Women’s door and unlocked it. “Well, I don’t know!” She scolded me as she stomped off.
    Isn’t that great? How dare you she was saying to me. How dare you not make your gender known to me, confuse me, make me look like a jerk.
    This is a wonderful thing.

To Be Continued…