I Am The Least Difficult of Men

All I want is boundless love. -Frank O’Hara

Getting gender-policed at the Hemingway Museum felt like my very own "The Old Man and the Sea."

There are so many things I wanted to write about this week. As if on cue, someone I follow on Twitter shared this Maud Newton quote a few moments ago: “I don’t think of it as procrastination. I think of it as allowing my work to accumulate urgency.” And like clockwork, I’m sitting down again to decide what to write.

My first idea was to write about Key West, which is where I just spent a few mostly-blissful days. I wanted to rant about the person selling tickets for the Hemingway Home down there, who first asked, “Is he over twelve?” referring to me and then, when I spoke (damn voice betraying me), stared at me through narrowed, unfriendly eyes and then said, “Oh, you’re a she, ain’t you?” I wanted to describe for you how I was so crushed and confused and upset that I couldn’t even respond. Just stood there limply, the full-body reaction happening on the inside where it hurt the most and was loudest. Wanted to share the idea I came up with only afterward when, mounting my rental bike, I thought about how many times I’ve been in that same position of being so stunned by someone’s utterances that I couldn’t respond, and decided I would get some cheap little business cards made up. They’d maybe have the old standby ” __MALE __FEMALE __FUCK YOU,” and then maybe some kind of educational statement, and I’d hand them out so that I’d never have to feel like I failed to turn something into a teaching moment.

I wanted, also, to write about how Christmas happened and my parents toasted to their son (!) and a flight attendant called me “sir” (!) and how all of that made my heart swell. Wanted to write about Frank O’Hara’s poems (read him!) and about this new book I’m reading, José Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, and about bursting open our queer political imagination (we should dream big and not settle!). I wanted to share this great thing that CAConrad wrote this week, which was,

“I actually had an old friend say to me when I was complaining about gays wanting to join the military, “Maybe you’re just afraid of growing up?” Rainbow stickers on machine guns killing people in Afghanistan is GROWING UP? FUCK THAT!”

I have wanted to write, too, about feelings I have been feeling. (Though this is nothing new.) About abundance vs. scarcity, belonging vs. not; about family. We want abundance for ourselves but we don’t want to be anyone else’s extra. (O’Hara: “Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?”) We want to feel crucial. It’s only natural. But we are not always crucial in every arrangement. Sometimes this is liberating: “You decide where we eat today. I don’t want to.” Other times, well. Is it the human condition to want to be needed? Where do we feel most at home? With chosen family, what keeps us together and where are our models?

In the future, glitter will be a balanced breakfast.

I am trying to be critically idealistic about all of this. What I want: A world where no one polices gender the way the woman at the Hemingway Home did. One where the only time the word “bomb” is uttered is when it is preceded by the word “glitter.” Glitter, lots of glitter in this world. And it’s not that there would be no heartbreak or hurt feelings. But the heart would always be able to soften again, and we would be in it together. I tell my students that being a writer is mostly an alone thing but that the classroom is where we learn about being alone together, about building community around our aloneness. In this world we would be (already are) alone together and we would have all of the compassion and astonishment and entanglement that would come from such a realization. And boundless love. My dear friend Roy calls his non-love-poems his “secular” poems, because, in his words, “worship is worship.” Yes, and we are at the altar, learning how to rise into love, not fall, as Berlin wrote last week. We would love ourselves as much as we loved each other. And in this world, we would get paid for doing the hard work of love! Because it’s hard fucking work. We would believe that there was enough, because there would be enough. Abundance wouldn’t be just an idea. It would be something we could feel and believe in.

So maybe what I wanted to write about was how things are and how I want them to be. As Arundhati Roy wrote, “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” And I have become aware of feeling a new kind of gratitude. It’s for all the fierce queer and trans folks who dream big and enact love in all kinds of gentle and wild ways. You inspire me to continue to do the same. We may be queer-mudgeons but secretly or not so secretly there are simply things we want from the world. Is love even the right word? Maybe what I mean to say is hope. But loving must be a kind of hoping. A kind that has no end, but rather is the end. (Or in gay terms, the process.) We should not settle for this world, because this world is not settling—it’s about to spin (like a big disco ball) into a brand new year, and we’ve got work to do.

Image credits: Fish Slap is a from Transitive Properties. Unicorn Glitter is from Ape Lad on flickr creative commons.