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Tim - The Turn of the Century

The turn of the century, I've always called it - 1969/1970. I had
thumbed my hippie self all the way from Asheville, NC, to Seattle to live
with a straight boy I'd met named Tim, just because he said he loved me.
Straight boys could love queer boys back then, we hadn't yet polarized
them into their own defensive closets. Breeders, we called them - some
termed them "fuzzies" - and Tim was (a fuzzy - all over) and I loved
him. Tim would sleep with me, in my single back-porch bed. I slept hard -
he never was, even in the mornings, but none of that mattered. When Robin,
the soon-to-be-wife, visited, Tim would still come curl up with me, we'd
rub each others' backs and stuff, then he'd traipse off to his bed with
Robin. Robin understood - Tim loved me - you could be that way back then.
When Robin moved in for good I got a room in a boarding house. A rabid
drag queen lived in the back apartment and was the manager. In the room
next to mine was a man named Gary, 26, a beautiful hippie with long, if
balding, hair. Gary was a fuzzy also, but we soon began sleeping together.
I believe he saw it as his political duty to sleep with me, but it also
satisfied some need in both of us, and I would spend a half-hour every
night rubbing rosemary oil onto Gary's balding spot and combing the rest
through his mop of chestnut hair. He was subject to fungal infections and
I'd be allowed to smear the relevant creams throughout all the crevices of
his groin - he never got hard, but I didn't care. I loved him.
We didn't consider ourselves liberated back then, and we didn't care,
this made us feel special. Neither feminist egalitarians nor Madison Avenue
opportunists had yet congealed us into homo-american fagazoids. We were not
a consumerist target group, we were a bunch of wacky mishaps on the make.
We staged a sit-in in the park in which both boys and girls (they were
still girls back then, honest) removed our shirts. When the cops came to
arrest the females, we guys insisted we be taken too, since after all we
were committing the same crime. They didn't buy it, but we went to the
station anyway - they let the girls go.
One especially wily character, Terri, had changed her sex from y to i.
When the cops grabbed her she announced: Hey, wanna see my dick,
asshole? They let her go - they certainly weren't going to throw her in
with the women. Terri's breasts were not subtle, but even less subtle were
the earrings that she showed up with a couple of months later - her
testicles, drained, dried, and dipped in varnish - tres chic.
Casablanca hadn't invented disco and destroyed the novelty and
charisma of bona fide R&B dance clubs. Seattle's premier club was "Shelly's
Leg". Shelly had had her left leg blown off one day while walking by a
construction site. With the collected insurance money she created a
fabulous dance club downtown. The way there was dark and unmarked. I went
alone, barefoot, barechested, in nothing but my wrap-around Capezio dance
skirt. I was alone in the forest where wolves lurked, but - change of
metaphors here - Grandma's house was Wonderland itself, replete with satin
ball, the Spinners, Barry White, the Staple Singers, and the Jacksons
(remember them?). True, I was only sixteen, but a state ID card with my
birthday erased and corrected in pencil never seemed to get questioned - no
big deal, I didn't drink, I just danced. I won the Seattle "bump"
championship two years in a row.
Those were the days, and I question what our counter-culture has given
us since, other than a clarified closet and a few repealed laws. When I
visit Castro Street now I feel oppressed like I never did back then. I feel
like a commodity market, a political digit, and an alien among my own
species. That's okay, there's other worlds to conquer. I well remember the
dramatic day when Tim came home to find me in the bathroom with my long
hair in my left hand and the scissors in the right. I told him that I was
no longer a hippie, I was a fag. He smiled - he still loved me.


- Bolinas, CA, 1997