Previously in print. Now left unsupervised.
Anyone trying to sell a few extra barrels of beer has started a Mister or Drag competition. Half the community is walking around with a sash across the shoulder or a crown on an empty head.
I was discussing it recently with my false friend,the vacuity taking over our community. Not that my other half says much anymore after all these years, especially when I’m riding one of my hobbyhorses again, but she pulls faces. Enough for me to know the message lands. If she looks annoyed, I know I’m right. If she smiles, I know I’m not being taken seriously at all. You should know we come from an older generation. My vicious other had herself “reconstructed” sometime in the late seventies, and by now I genuinely have no idea what lives in her underwear. Before the operation there wasn’t much there for me to enjoy either, and those surgeries, back then only done in Morocco, weren’t exactly something to place your hopes in.
I still remember her coming back with a wooden block between her legs. That’s how it was done. Completely insecure.
“Do you still love me like this?” she asked, holding a stack of birth announcements her trans friends had sent her. The same people who showed up the next day with rusks and pink sugar sprinkles, because in their boundless imagination this counted as some sort of rebirth as a woman. I watched it all and thought: this really has to stop getting more ridiculous.
“Did I ever truly love you?” I said, a lump in my throat, because it did affect me, even if what had been there before had never been a reason for me to protest the surgery. I had more trouble with the hormone treatment, illegally cobbled together courses of contraceptives meant for actual women. I quickly learned not to use the phrase “actual women,” because back then we still had those solid BK pans with heavy cast-iron bottoms, and she threw them with the precision of a Russian discus athlete.
Still, the army taught me that even under the worst circumstances you keep morale high, so I had decided that, with or without the block, I would say something romantic to the false creature:
“You go lie on your stomach and read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Márquez. Daddy will manage here.”
I had misjudged that, initially. A wooden oak block makes for considerably harder landings than something like a prostate. All suffering ends eventually. One day that block simply went into the fireplace, and I suspect the surgically constructed opening closed up again fairly quickly. Yes, sorry, I cannot bring myself to use that other word. What I was left with was a willing but demanding bottom wearing a ridiculous wig. I still cannot say out loud that I love her, but according to the neighbors we are the longest-standing couple on this canal, and for the attentive listener that should be enough.
Time heals everything. Her malice now expresses itself mostly through disapproving facial expressions, and my breasts are twice the size of hers by now. The modest mortgage from 1982 on the canal house, once gutted by squatters and put in both our names, has increased in value so much that the second mortgage alone will carry us to the grave in relative comfort. A crossdresser with a strong urge to penetrate and a vicious trans partner is apparently not such a bad combination in practice.
I didn’t intend to talk about us, but about the emptiness of our LGBTQ+ community. Anyone wanting to sell a few extra barrels of beer has started a Mister or Drag pageant. Half the community walks around with a sash over the shoulder or a crown on an empty head. The rest circles around them like barking puppies. I don’t understand those sashes at all. Can you even have sex with them on? No, that’s apparently not even allowed anymore, I read somewhere. What exactly did we start all that activism for? Not to get married and pay more taxes only to end up out on the street when things fall apart. It was about experiencing sex and love differently from the majority, wasn’t it? Not about mobilizing our networks to boost the drink sales of slick operators in hospitality.
I make no secret of the fact that I consider our publisher an imbecile who reads nothing and spends his time photographing pretty people from a stool. He has fully joined the cult of emptiness with his talk of Cover Girls and Centerfolds, while I still remember him as a young Che Guevara, fighting against the current for bisexual acceptance, education for schoolchildren and police officers. But recently, a small light flickered again in that grey head of his when he flatly and publicly refused NORDEN’s nomination for The Dutch Queen Awards. He had no intention of encouraging “his” people to vote on some dubious website that clearly needed traffic. He preferred to celebrate “his own girls.” That’s not exactly how he phrased it. I’m paraphrasing. But for a moment, I recognized him again. He immediately received threats, of course, but the man has stood in court so many times over his statements in the media that it didn’t trouble him in the slightest. Otherwise, he would have asked me to pay those people a visit. He’s like that too.
Part of the Madame Boissevin archive →