“When I say I was a faggot before I was a queen, what I mean is that I didn’t know. I didn’t know what they saw. And once I did know, I didn’t know how they saw it. Later I realized it was gender they saw and not desire, but can gender be an expression of desire too. I know we’re supposed to see the two as separate, but what about when they aren’t so separate? It was always the girls who gave me shelter, but also they were looking for shelter. I mean we gave each other shelter. So I was always told I was a girl, and told I could never be a girl. So many faggots have this story to tell, and yet there are so few spaces where we can embrace it.
When I say I was a faggot before I was a queen, I should say that queer was the word and the world I stepped into as soon as I got away, and faggot was what I embraced once I knew I needed to reject even more. I remember the time my parents came with me to an ACT UP meeting in San Francisco, when I was 19, and they said they were impressed by how passionate everyone was, how eloquent, but why did they have to talk that way? You don’t talk that way. They meant the lisp and the swish, and that’s when I realized I was still holding back. I was holding onto the gestures I’d cultivated in high school, counterculture as a way to camouflage femininity, a toughness that said I didn’t care what anyone thought. So when my parents said you don’t talk that way, and they meant it as a compliment, I was embarrassed. I remember the first time I walked through the Castro, with my friend Denise in 1992, after driving cross-country. Everyone had said this is where you need to go, to find everything. But when we got there, all we found was that we didn’t matter. There were no dykes, so that meant no Denise, and all the fags were busy trying to fit into the exact type of masculinity that was everything I despised. And that was the end of the Castro, the end of the Castro for me. At least there was a gay bookstore, A Different Light, and there was always some flaming queen or gender-bending diva reigning at the front counter—and honey, those girls recognized me. I would never have said it then, but I was terrified of each of them in different ways. I was terrified they would see me, and I was terrified they wouldn’t.”
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