The Amazon Trail
| The Amazon Trail My New Glasses |  |
by Lee Lynch
I resent being defined by my preference in intimate partners. When I come out to some people, non-gay men in particular, I can see slight – or broad – changes in their expressions. Superimposed over my loose cargo jeans, oversized denim shirt, sack-like jacket and a New York Yankees/pink triangle/rainbow baseball cap – superimposed over this butch armor, their peep-show minds are running a 15-second continuous-loop faux-lesbian porn film.
This I find a tad unsettling. If accused they would deny it, of course. I suspect it’s one of those involuntary reflexive things, like the way a dog will bark at the sight of strangers ambling down the street. And non-gay women aren’t much better. With them, it’s: “You’re gay? Oh, how nice. My best friend’s 31st cousin on her step-mother’s side once worked in a beauty parlor.”
And I’m like, “And your point is?” But I don’t say it out loud, probably in an attempt to make meeting-the-lesbian a positive experience for the new co-worker so she won’t implicitly teach her sons to beat up queers.
Something along these lines happened just the other day. My librarian friend and I were out walking – and I do mean out. She was wearing her navy baseball cap, comfy-looking pants and a well-worn leather jacket. I was in my cargo jeans, nylon jacket and red baseball cap.
As we approached, a woman who lives around the corner was outside her house trying to quiet her dog. “Scruffy!” she admonished over and over. The week before I’d made a neighborly conversational breakthrough when I’d admired her snowdrops and she’d launched into a long complaint about how she’d planted both bluebells and white bells and only these white bells had come up, except for a few blue bells across the street. So this time, on my habitual evening walk with the Librarian, I made some friendly remark about Scruffy the dog. That apparently was all the encouragement the neighbor needed to get personal.
“You two live over there?” she asked, gesturing in the general direction of the home of a lesbian couple one street west. I called out a no while the Librarian pointed helpfully south. We walked on.
There had been a world of nuance in the neighbor’s five words, I thought. She didn’t ask where the Librarian had gotten her cool jacket or ask me if I had managed to grow blue bells in my garden. She didn’t introduce herself or ask our names. She was telling us that she thought we were gay, and was asking us to confirm said assumption based on neighborhood scuttlebutt that lesbians lived around the corner. Wrong lesbians, lady, but obviously if two lesbians are walking together, we must do whatever lesbians do in bed and live together so we can do it 24/7 except when we take walks to keep in shape.
The neighbor might have been reaching out in acknowledgement and acceptance, or freaking that lesbians were taking over the neighborhood, or she could be a married lesbian longing to step out on her man (my first take on her). It doesn’t matter. The Librarian and I are not girlfriends and don’t live together, but the neighbor needed to pigeonhole us.
Maybe this isn’t a gay thing at all. How do straight people think of one another? Isn’t it all about mating for them? Don’t straight men automatically reduce women to the lowest common denominator of secondary sex characteristics and bed-ability? Isn’t this what feminists have been objecting to for over a century? And if it is, what does that say about the human race? Straight women are just the same, automatically looking at men as potential mates, sexual partners, flirtations.
I have to wonder if my neighbor’s need to know is some basic facet of human nature. Maybe we all define ourselves by our sexuality? Is this why straights get so upset when they can’t tell if I’m a boy or a girl – they don’t know where to place me on the mating scale?
But don’t I do it too? I scorn women who smear on make up and dress to interest men. I laugh at male poseurs and he-men showoffs who are trying to attract women just as they laugh at drag queens and at me. What do lesbians talk about when a new girl comes to town? Is she or isn’t she? And if she is, who does she sleep with? If that answer is no one, then let the matchmaking begin.
My gosh, could my butch armor be the equivalent of a straight girl’s revealing dress? When I decided that I wanted new glasses like Harry Potter’s, I thought I was getting them so I would look like an androgynous, radically queer fifty-something. What if I’m not dressing only to confuse the straights, but also to make a statement to radically queer fifty-something femmes? If accused, I would deny it, of course.
Lee Lynch is the author of eleven books including The Swashbuckler and the Morton River Valley Trilogy. She lives on the Oregon Coast, and comes from a New England family.
© Lee Lynch 2003