Why, yes...

...I am posting a lot. Because the blog, it feels bare.

This may be just a whisp of a post, though, more of a cambric post really. About something whose relevance I can't vouch for, because it's just sort of a disgusting curled up notional caterpillar until I type it out.

I went to get my haircut, because it was right at the midpoint between "that looks ok" and "he probably is a hipster and intends it to be seen as a vague sort of commentary." In college I got the cheapest haircuts possible, then for a decade I clippered my own damn head, and then there's been some time of sartorial reckoning. I decided I was going to get an expensive haircut, because my boyfriend had gotten one at this place on the Lower East Side, and skeptic though I am about many things high-end, it was undeniably a good haircut. Once in my life, I thought, I will give this a shot. If it's great, I'm in a bind. If it's just like my last haircut, I've blown $25 extra bucks and am the wiser.

This place, it's hard to figure exactly. The Lower East Side is part Chinatown, part Williamsburg, some weird little remnant of Jewish New York with the little shops where you can buy a tiny Torah for I guess confirmation classes...I dunno what else; it's not really my part of town. So I don't know exactly who goes to this place. I imagined maybe a preponderance of gay hipsters.

The guys cutting the hair, though, unless my 'dar is broken or these guys are super ultra mega stealth models*, are incredibly straight. Like I am hardly a Van Dyke style homo separatist--Some Of My Best Friends Are Straight as the saying goes--but it was like I was listening in on a secret society. I'd like to try to recreate some of the conversation, because it was like I was hearing West Frisian: familiar-sounding, but not quite comprehensible. "Whoever Puffy puts on, it's Puffy that eats. You remember Puffy put Total on--where is he now?" That was one paragraph I couldn't do much with.

So of course my coiffeur asks how I heard of the place and this is the miniscule point to this posting. "My boyfriend got his hair cut here," says I. Coiffeur basically doesn't respond. It's New York and I doubt he was either shocked or offended, but I had that twinge of nervousness, bred in the middle of the country where I grew up, for just a second that I'd gotten on the wrong side of the law somehow.

Compulsory assumption of heterosexuality is not the biggest problem in the world. It's a historical thing. It'll be gone in fifty years. Often when it pops up now, it's quickly amended. This guy, for all I know, wasn't even doing it. It's something that's been maintained by both sides until one side stopped and certain members of the other side got it.

This is so unimportant but it reminds me of important things. I started coming out in about 1989, in Kentucky. It was a nerve-wracking process that never went seriously wrong. The best coming out scene I've seen in pop culture lately was on Glee, where the kid obviously has a moment of courage, takes a blind leap, and it goes surprisingly well, with reservations. I cried. Anyway.

Coming out stories--I remember when they were the first thing one went over on a date or coffee-interview-for-date. It was tedious. But it had to happen, because coming out is the essential political act. I have complained a lot, a lot to my friends lately about the thing that happened in the last year while gay marriage to my eternal astonishment started to happen in the U.S.: going to protests, standing in a cordoned area, chanting heinously banal things to nobody but ourselves. Two, Four, Six, Eight, We'd be really grateful if you'd maybe in the next eighty years not discrimn...ate. So much. If that's ok.

It really does sound that feeble to me now. I started getting furious and said to the lesbian standing beside me "why are we not throwing things through other things?" She smiled at me as you smile at a rabid dog. And I was no more right than she was. Stonewall was a moment, not necessarily a model for what should happen now. The fantasy of violent protest is a satisfying one, but, like the fantasies of an obsessive, healthy to acknowledge rather than to act on, or so that you can keep from acting on it.

The real political act is, yeah, coming out. I have always thought so, and so I am out in as many contexts as I can be, sometimes even when it's awkward or not 100% appropriate to the situation. It's the only thing that works. So this old habit reared its head in a city where the chant we might hear back is "You're here, you're queer, we're used to you already." And in a context where the worst possible consequence might have been an unwanted flat-top. There was no reason to lie, so I didn't.


*my gaydar: it is really good