-- Citizen D
I initially encouraged her to surround herself with positive images that reinforced her new journey of self-discovery because that's what I thought it was: a personal discovery. Little did I know that it was an all-or-nothing proposition, an Entity that moved in with her like an ornery extra roommate, and that even our appliances
would have to choose sides.
I remember the day the refrigerator came out. It was about a week after her car, which sprouted a large reflective rainbow stripe across the back window and an Indigo Girls bumper sticker. Fine, I thought, that's her car and particularly in Austin, the automobile functions as a sociopolitical mouthpiece as well as a means of getting from here to there. But the day I went to grab some cheese and a beer from the fridge and found it sporting editorials about gay marriage, I had to take a step back.
Hang on, now: decorating your car is fine just like wearing slogans on your clothing is fine-the holder of the belief is right there and easily identifiable. But my cheese is blameless; my beer doesn't give a shit if Adam was banging Eve or Steve or both with the serpent looking on.
Let me take a moment to make it clear that I had previously made my peace with lesbianism, not capitalized. I had worked at an independent bookstore where storewide emails referred to the "Womyn's Room" and the employee handbook tactfully clarified that shaving for either gender was entirely optional as long as the
employee adhered to basic standards of hygiene. I had also had a gay roommate before, but she contented herself with large Georgia O'Keefe pictures and a penchant for "all-natural" products wrapped in rough brown paper.
This Lesbianism was an entirely different thing. Suddenly nothing was safe and my own little enclave began to suffer border skirmishes. Posters popped up the living room of Rosie the Riveter snarling, "It's not just a tomboy phase," and a picture of two Nancy Drew types kittenishly reclined on a bed underneath the words, "How come all the cool girls are lesbians?" This was to say nothing of our new coffee table book, Annie Liebowitz's Women, opened permanently to the shot of Martina Navritalova half naked and cranking some kind of giant, greased-up wheel.
The final straw came when I broke up with my long-term boyfriend, whose overnight stays were always cut short with early morning blasts of Ani DiFranco and Melissa Etheridge and a barrage of anti-male jokes, most of which, sadly, went right over his handsome head. Suddenly my roommate and her girlfriend got noticeably friendlier with me. They began to exchange knowing glances over things like my new short haircut, my bitterness about relationships, and my frequent trips to the gym. My protestations that these were perfectly plausible expressions of grief and distraction over the loss of a major relationship were smirked at. More than once I was invited to book signings or concerts only to discover myself surrounded by angular women with mullets and tattoos asking gruffly, "Hey, ya wanna beer?"
But little did I know the full extent to which Lesbianism had taken over my living space. A month after I moved out of the Vaginally Militarized Zone and into my own humble little hetero hideout, I ran into one of my former neighbors at the pool. This guy is a testosterone-enhanced, grade-A beefcake of a guy and he lived with
another of his kind. We had exchanged nothing more than pleasantries in passing on the stairwell, though I often treated myself to a panoramic view of his regal ass while he bent over to unload things from his car. We chatted for a while at the pool and he asked me why I had moved out. "Money issues," was my truthful answer, but he asked, "So are you still together?"
"Together?"
And then the awful truth dawned on me: I had been unwittingly cock-blocked for an entire year. Not ten feet from my front door lived two sizzling hunks of ass peacefully going about their lives under the mistaken impression that I liked angry folk music, bulgar wheat, and munching rug. I was dumbfounded. How do you make up for 365 days of not popping next door for a quickie?
My addled brain came up with this: "Huh? Oh! Oh my God, I am so not gay! In fact I don't think you get more not gay than me. I mean, not that there's anything wrong with that. Of course."
My intellectual standing may be in question, but at least he knows I like dick.
I call this nothing short of absolute genious, thanks Rachel. Readers command more on the guestbook if you think Rachel should be a regualr poster. Also I will see what I can do about getting her on the contributors page.
-- Citizen D