Here’s another mess that won’t be edited until tomorrow.
I spent more than seven hours working on “Same Trailer, Different Park” today and it still isn’t finished. That’s less a testament to its quality, as you’ll ultimately see for yourselves, than further evidence my brain moves more slowly than a Jacques Rivette film. But maybe it’s a useful reminder — for me more than anyone else who might read this — of my continued desire to find personal meaning and lasting fulfillment in something more than laundry.
At any rate, during today’s writing and editing I was reminded of a silly incident that’s referenced in a footnote, and since I have nothing else to offer you tonight I’ll share it here in case anyone’s looking to kill some time. It began with this, about Felix:
Girls swooned over his darkly handsome features, favorably comparing him to pinups as disparate as Ricky Martin and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and sometimes approached me to nervously ask if he was single.**
Followed by this footnote:
There’s a story I need to tell about the time Felix realized I wasn’t invisible to men, but it’s too long for a footnote.
And here’s the continuation of that:
Not only did Felix have no equivalent experiences as my brother, he was outraged to discover in our early twenties that men were sexually interested in me. He was pushing a broom around our family’s business one afternoon when he saw me interact with a courier.
“When you walked away from that guy, he stared at your ass!” he later reported in disbelief. “Right in front of me! Then you came back and he acted polite.” He’d never been particularly protective of me, or progressive in his attitudes toward women, so I was surprised by his sudden metamorphosis into Betty Friedan.
“Yeah, I know. He asked me out.”
That, too, offended him, and he grumbled “I should’ve kicked his ass.” Not long afterward, our dad walked by and Felix stopped him to rant about it: “This guy was, like, 30, and he stared at [Cranky’s] ass!”
“Men have been doing that since I was 12,” I interjected, which also caught my brother — but not our poor father — off-guard.
In the 25 years since I came out to my parents, my dad has told me almost annually of the relief and jubilation he privately felt each time one of his daughters moseyed out of the closet. His foremost concerns, then and now, were about our safety, namely gay-bashing and his enduring fear that societal prejudice would make our lives much harder than if we were straight. But if there was a silver lining to two-thirds of his daughters being gay, and he insisted there was, it was liberation from worrying about all the vile boys and men we might have otherwise encountered along the way.
How my father, whose younger sister faced considerable harassment, some of it sexual, after coming out as a lesbian, could be so unsophisticated about such matters was beyond me. Lesbians are still women, after all, even if we don’t always meet his exacting beauty standards.* I listen to his Margaret White spiels about how terrible men are, nodding and laughing at the appropriate parts, and don’t puncture his delusions, even now, at 42, by saying “Dad, I hate to tell you this, but being a teenage lesbian didn’t repel creepy men — it just made them creepier.”
He doesn’t need to know that I was 16 the first time a married man unsuccessfully tried to interest me in a threesome with his bicurious wife, or how many times the average lesbian hears “You haven’t been with a real man. I can turn you straight…” in her life.** Nor did I have the heart to shatter another cherished myth that once helped him sleep better at night, by regretfully informing him that young women aren’t that much different than young men — they want the ‘one thing’ guys want, along with our very souls.
* My dad is related by blood and marriage to assorted lesbians who wear makeup, who wear dresses, and who spend way too much time on their hair, but he’ll still tell you with a straight face that all lesbians look like Rosie O’Donnell. As recently as 2019, he told me the CW series Batwoman wasn’t believable because its lead actress, Ruby Rose, was “too pretty” to be a lesbian. Rose was, as I reminded him, openly lesbian, but he’s not the most detail-oriented guy.
** And that was before creepy men started wearing Hot Topic dresses and calling us bigots for not wanting to sleep with them. (Here’s the obligatory disclaimer that there’s nothing inherently creepy about trans women. But there is something creepy — and not even slightly feminine — about bullying, manipulative incels who rail against “genital preference” in their homophobic, misogynist screeds about natal women who don’t want to sleep with natal men. I feel just as strongly about trans men who cry persecution when gay men don’t hit them up on Grindr, though I doubt angry 5’1″ trans guys make gay men feel physically intimidated.)