Archive | Queer Matters

Augusts (Not August) Past

Once I had a girlfriend from Venezuela, and whenever she kissed me, she’d run her hands through my hair and laugh. “You have a baby’s hair,” she’d say in Spanish, and I wasn’t fluent enough to tell if if she was mocking or complimenting me.

Really, what she was doing was comparing me to someone else, which is never a compliment to anyone.

This woman had thick, dark hair that framed her face in tight ringlets, and the effect took my breath away no matter how cross I was with her. She was neither feminine nor masculine, just extremely beautiful in a self-made way. She wore enormous green glasses and lots of layers in different shades of the same color, and she had very long lashes and very soft skin and very hard muscles. I liked touching her and I liked her touching me, and we were always better off when we didn’t talk.

For one thing, she had a wife whom I knew, and whenever my girlfriend and I talked at any length she assured me they had an open relationship. When she did this, I hated us both, for the lie was so apparent that it cheapened everything.

Still she smelled and felt wonderful and I liked our small adventures. We’d meet somewhere off the beaten track for an afternoon drink and then float into a hotel room until she had to rush off to a couple’s thing. My girlfriend seemed more aroused by betrayal than any physical act, but I’d thrill every time she’d lay her strong hands upon me. The sex warp would hold me for days. Continue Reading →

The Others

The sun drops, and I’m surrounded by the spoils of a solitary Saturday night in June. Also the spoils of last night and the largest part of today with my beau.

I feel at odds with myself in that rare way that happens when you’ve sailed through a fog of discovery with a Winesburg, Ohio, “and here is this other.”  I suspect only introverts react this way; we so rarely take people on–or in, not to put too fine a point on it–that we must inject them right into our bloodstream to ensure no unwanted antibodies are produced. A mild withdrawal is inevitable, not remotely unpleasant.

I’m still picky, not nearly as prickly.

After he and I parted ways today, my bruja rewiring went into such overgear that it’d be funny if I had any financial safety net to cushion the blows. I tried on dresses I’d fetched from the tailor only to grimly declare them all prime candidates for take-twos. House Internet died, phone keyboard morphed into a ouija keyboard (how drearily on brand). I slipped into a favorite silk robe only to remember it’d been ripped up in a pique of passion. Continue Reading →

Rebecca Collerton, 3/10/65-4/27/18

I loved Rebecca Collerton. She was gruff but she had to be, what with that huge heart she was toting around and our retrogressive world and her utter inability to suffer fools. She always snuck a cookie into my bag—a nudge, which she and Caroline Fidanza let me name—and she helped me launch my Ruby Intuition practice. It wasn’t just that she and Saltie co-owners Elizabeth Schula and Caroline had me read for everybody who was anybody on their little brown bench on New Years Day, 2010. It was that she hand-lettered my signs and made a special potion to take the edge off the readings by relabeling a Powers Whiskey bottle “Psychic Powers Whiskey” and then kept quietly quietly refilling my glass when I wasn’t looking. I knew if I had Bex’s seal of approval then I couldn’t totally be full of shit and I went from there, her good wind all I needed on my back. And she let me read for her and took what I saw to heart enough to let it be good wind on her back. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy