Love Like Mine

NOLA Pride Week 2018 was my first large pride event, and I was determined to get comfortable with my androgynous aesthetic ideals. My partner and I planned to meet up with a few of our queer friends and ride the streetcar to the Quarter to attend a fem party at the Coyote Ugly Saloon. Getting dressed was an exhausting undertaking. I fought off a spell of dysphoria triggered by my depression weight loss.

I was smaller. Thinner, and I felt fragile compared to when I was depressed and overweight. Everything I tried on reminded me too much of a body and a life that I no longer wanted. I knew I wasn’t going to end up looking like Grace Jones, but I was hoping for sexy and slightly more masculine androgyny. I settled on a black turtleneck tank that highlighted my shoulders and arms—the only body parts I unambiguously liked—and a borrowed maroon skirt. Finally, I looked cute.

We met up with our glitter-covered friends and boarded the streetcar for Canal and Carondelet. The evening air was thick, but intermittent gusts through the open windows soothed my anxieties about having to face something like what happened in Orlando. There were several queer couples holding hands and sneaking drinks a few rows in front of us. I was comforted by memories of expressing my queer pride in college. My concerns faded into the grinding and whirring of the streetcar.

 ***

I wrung my chapped hands under the harsh light of the Student Center. In the awkward pause between chatting and departing, I watched little wisps of coffee curls blow in the northern country cold. I tried not to stare at her mouth while we stalled our departures.

“Good luck on your Walden paper.”

“Enjoy Kerouac.”

“Ugh, don’t get me started. On The Road is so dense and boring. I just hate cross-country classics like Grapes of Wrath… But, anyway, I had a lot of fun at the advocates formal.”

The night of the formal swirled in my mind. When her puffy Cupid’s bow had pressed firmly against mine in the coatroom, and we’d unintentionally worn matching burgundy dresses.

After her last halfhearted complaint about impending homework, I stepped forward through a cloud of her breath and pressed my mouth to hers. When I retreated from her personal space, her smile was a little coy, and perhaps proud. It was my very first girlfriends kiss and, without knowing it, it was her first public openly gay couple kiss. That night I knew I was part of a community.

 ***

For years since then, I visually “passed” as a cis male. Strangers see a heterosexual cisgender couple when they look at us. People sometimes pause because we are an interracial couple, but our journeys as young queer adults remain mostly invisible. Our kisses seldom felt like an act of bravery or identity, even though our lives and livelihoods are constantly at risk from government protection rollbacks, increasing violence against queer people, and virulent transphobia in the US.

An hour aboard the whirring streetcar later, we arrived. As soon as my feet touched the downtown sidewalk, my courage evaporated. Somehow, I’d forgotten that downtown was filled primarily with tourists from places with a more limited understanding of gender. I held her hand and tried to ignore the older white couples in Hawaiian shirts and golf skirts who clutched half-drunk hand grenades and gazed with fetishizing curiosity at my outfit. I said nothing to her or our friends but viscerally wished as we walked to stop and buy a pair of shorts, even at the risk of “passing” as cishet. When we finally arrived at the fem bar we were carded at the door:

“Hey, sorry, only ladies and fems get in for free. Cover for dudes is fifteen.”

Once again, I did not belong. I could have paid (my internal experience with gender was periwinkle at best), but I hated being penalized for my identity. What about me was signaling that I wasn’t fem enough? By the tone of the bouncer, it seemed he had assumed that I was a cis gay man who put on a skirt for one night of fun and called himself fem.

“Well, I identify as genderqueer.”

“Sorry, this is a ladies and fem night only.”

I wanted to chew the bouncer out, but I doubted that he was the type of queer (if he was gay at all) who knew what genderqueer or fem meant. I turned to my partner, face burning, and whisper-yelled,

“Well, I have a fucking vagina and fucking periods, and I am wearing what feels fem to me, so…”

“Excuse me,” she said. “This is my partner, they’re genderqueer, and you can’t charge them extra if they don’t identify as male either!”

“Fine.”

The bouncer nodded me through, and I avoided his gaze while he stamped my hand.

I had hoped that, once inside, several shots and some garish dancing would bring color back into the evening. It hadn’t been that bad of an “altercation,” with no violence or real threat. But instead of staccato pop music occupying my mind, there were images of my girlfriend and other friends easily slipping inside an official queer space that had determined I didn’t fit. While the bar was full of pride decorations, it simultaneously made me feel that I belonged on the outskirts of even the queer community.

While drunken jubilance flashed across each of my companions’ faces, the regrets I had about losing membership in “female” spaces, culture, and community came barreling down on me. I needed all the same resources. I mourned for the absence of sisterhood and support I had lost trying to understand the balance of genders within me. I wasn’t a woman, and I didn’t want to be male, but I stilled craved the fierce support of queer women and even straight women. Because no matter how my gender identity fluctuated, the socialization of womanhood felt safer than the socialization of men.

-Téo Chesney

Téo Chesney is currently living in New Orleans and studying as a nonfiction MFA student at the University of New Orleans. They were adopted from Brázil as an infant and raised in southern Vermont. Coming out as a transmasculine significantly changed how they consider the self and shaped much of their writing. Téo has published works of fiction in Crab Fat Magazine and Paragon Journal. They have also published poetry in the St. Lawrence University Magazine, The Laurentian Magazine, and Tiny Seeds Journal. Instagram: teo_chesney. Twitter: @ChesneyTeo.