"Queer, There, and Everywhere"

All great conversations used to start with a drink in one hand and a laugh on the lips.

Cheers.

I had a lot to think about tonight as I sat drinking a crazy-ass key lime martini at the corner queer bar tonight. I was -- de rigueur -- off at a table to myself, drinking, reading a newspaper, and making small talk with the touchyfeelygirlyboy waiter. He was very concerned that I have a good time and gave me a peck on the cheek to prove it. Did he think I was a cross-dresser? Was he just filled with sister-love? Did I really project an aura of yearning for inappropriate professional contact? Would condoms come with the drink if I ordered a second round? What was his cut-off football jersey all about?

He was lovely, to be fair, and genuinely friendly. He liked stroking my arms as he checked in on my "table" -- that is, on me. I was, as I already said, sitting alone.

I didn't even have other empty chairs at my table. The party next to me had snagged the two bar stools that were keeping me company. Stools that suggested--cleverly, falsely--that friends of mine would be joining me soon. Invisible friends.

The reason my stools were poached? One table over sat an attractive lesbian with cropped blond hair and a soft-butch-athletic build that I couldn't help lingering over. It was *her* birthday, and she had more friends at the bar that night than she could talk to at one time. No holding court in that place, given the music volume: the largest number of friends who could hear what she yelled at any given moment was four. Her gang kept shifting and sorting so that they could hang out in her orbit, within earshot, flitting and cooing and scuffling their way around her all the livelong, neon night.

Their jollies didn't overtake my thoughts completely.

What was really on my mind tonight was an old argument I've been having with one of my very oldest friends. He -- a full-fledged outandabout gay man -- thinks that I'm not really queer. Even though the most crushing crush of my life was on a woman. In spite of the fact that the first erotic experience I ever had was shaving a boy's legs in preparation for him donning girls' underwear. Discounting, apparently, the years of service I put in as a faghag. And he seems also to be brushing aside the fact that my life has from time to time been all about chasing 'Hermaphrodite.'

Sheesh, what does it take?

True, it seems as though girls like me (omnisexual, with a particular bent for transgendered people) really don't have a place at the table, except in the electric blue soaked impressionistic world of David Bowie. But I'm here. I've got my own table. I've got a stool I can park my curvy ass on. I've got a fancy drink. And I'm thinking that even those of us in the world's 'miscellaneous' category deserve a little queer love.