Identity

I thought of a clever title for this one earlier, but I've totally forgotten about it.

I 'came out' not that long ago as a gay bottom...who is a lesbian. The funny thing is, everyone I told went, "Uh, yeah...duh...", which kind of stole my thunder, lol. But it was a big revelation for me. More on this later.

Growing up, we're all told that there are two genders: male or female. Boy or girl. Man or woman.

As we grow up a little, the luckier/more enlightened of us find out that if you're not happy with your birth gender, you can switch. But that's still only two options.

I don't want to transition. I don't feel like I need to; I just have a phantom penis, ok? I've known this for a while. Strange, luckily, is the same way. But she also enjoys vaginal sex, which I don't at all--I find it painful, and I get bladder infections. So I've gotten kind of disenfranchised (I love that word) with my vagina. Last night we were doing a scene, and Strange opened my labia, and it felt really weird, like my scrotum had been opened into my two separate testes. I mentioned this, and Strange went along with it, which was awesome.

Later on, when she was sounding my urethra, I asked, "Why is it that I enjoy anal, and sounding, and don't enjoy the cooch at all?" She laughed and said, "Because you're a boy, you don't have a cooch." Which is really how I feel, more and more, and how I may as well be, for all intents and purposes. The only thing my vagina does is bleed sporadically. Which I can do without.

But I don't really want to have surgery to get a penis, either. That would be weird. I -have- a penis, why would I need another? I don't need one that people can see. Strange can see it, and that's enough. It would be like in the Last Unicorn, when Mommy Fortuna gives her a horn that everyone can see. She doesn't need a horn--she's a unicorn. She has one.

That being said, it might be nice to have interchangeable parts from time to time--stick on a dick and have it respond like a dick, and be able to leave my breasts on or off. Or have surgery be really minor, like in the Uglies series.

I recently read Dick for a Day, which was good, interesting and depressing. I don't want to be a 'man' and I don't want to be a 'woman'. I just want to be me. A 'woman' body with a 'man' body superimposed on top, and not really one or the other. Patricia Cornwell's essay thing was the stupidest thing ever, but I really enjoyed Poppy Z. Brite's. I've read several of her books, and I love the way she depicts gay characters, but it made me wonder about her 'sexuality. She wrote:

"In my dreams, I have a dick. Not in all of them, only in the good ones. Not just for a day, but for always.

"The first time I dreamed of having a dick, I was seven. I was standing in the bathroom wearing a pair of big white boxer shorts, and attached to my body was a new organ filled with wonderful sensation. The sensuality of the dream was marred only slightly by the fact that I was Tom Bosley of Happy Days.

"I've always known I was queer, but saying 'I'm not a lesbian, I'm a gay man in a female body' doesn't help matters a great deal in high school, so I stayed home nights dreaming, and eventually writing, about the torrid sex lives of gay boys. In 1995, Kate Bornstein's book Gender Outlaw finally clued me in to the liberating term 'non-operative transsexual.'

"A dick for a day? I would spend the day worshiping it, as dick possessors tend to do, and letting it do the thinking, as dicks will. I would give it over to the mouths and hands and assholes of as many tantalizing men as I could get my hands on. I would be the worst nelly slut you ever saw. And, for once in my life, I would mourn the coming of night."

It really clicked for me, because that's exactly how I feel; like I can be a lesbian and only sleep with women, but still be a gay man in my head, and enjoy gay erotica much more than lesbian, etc. I don't have to be limited by my body, or anyone else's rules but my own when it comes to sex. I read somewhere recently, I don't remember where (it was probably Dick for a Day) that the mind has no sex. By sex, they mean gender, although it's funny the other way, but it's still profoundly true: in our heads, we create the way we look. It's like those movies where people die/go into a computer/whatever and they look different, because they don't look the way they do in a mirror, they look the way they do in their heads. So I can be a woman with a cock, or a man with breasts, or neither, or both, or one or the other, and any and all of them are perfectly natural and no one in my head looks twice.

Which brings me back to the gay bottom thing. Among my circle of friends, it's become sort of a gentle, teasing joke, especially that they all knew before I did. But, on a very physical level, it's how I have sex: I suck, I fuck when asked to, I touch, I get jerked off, I cum, I am fucked up the ass, I'm sounded. This has to effect me somehow, having my vagina basically be a wound that I carry that doesn't heal. Would I stitch it up, if I could, and just leave the bits behind that I actually use, like it was some sort of appendix that I've out-evolved? I used the analogy (I love analogies) with Strange today of those fish that live in caves, that eventually no longer have eyes. Would I? I don't know. But for now, I'm glad to have come to these realizations, and have it be ok, at least with the people who know me.

Now, as for actually interacting with gay men...that's another story. While I have my 'Top 10 I Would Fuck If I Were A Man" list, actually carrying it out is unlikely. To reverse it: if a man approached me and said, "I'm a non-operative transexual. I have a phantom vagina." I would be...uncomfortable. I certainly wouldn't want to have the same effect on a gay man, that's the last thing I would want. But maybe at some point we'll actually meet some gay men, and I'll get to know them well enough to be able to tell them how I am, and then we can swap stories or whatever.

But until then, Strange is really all I need. Anything else would just be gravy.