Am I All Gay?

In the new job, I have a lot of contact with the transgendered among us. (We have a really great HIV prevention program up and running doing work with people of transgendered experience, and like all great HIV prevention programs, the services are peer-delivered.)

And on the job, I've met up with a couple of guys who, upon first meeting them, I think to myself, "Woof! Damn hot one he is!" (Of course, consumate professional that I am, I don't give voice to this. For a change. Straight family men at the supermarket in Plumsteadville, Pennsylvania, are one thing, but workplace romance is always a bad idea.)

But anyway, not infrequently, I come to learn that by gosh, by golly, these are men of transgender experience. That is to say, you probably wouldn't know them if you had only their 6th grade class picture to go by.

And this isn't a new phenomenon. In fact, most of the trans-men I've met I've been hot for.

I've never taken that anywhere, and I'm not sure how I'd feel about the absence of a penis, but it does give one pause. Or at least, it give sme pause.

After all, I am a gender essentialist. (I know, I know... All the transfolks reading this were on my side up until right then, right?) I feel there are essential male qualities and essential female qualities. Sort of like the logic that St. Thomas Aquinas came up with to explain how the bread and the wine at Mass becomes the true body and blood of Christ: he used the Aristotelian argument of substance and accidents. The substance of the wine is it's "wine-ness," the essence that makes it truly wine. Whether it's red or white, Merlot or Chardonnay, those are mere accidents, and it's still wine. And what happens when the wine is consecrated is that the accidents stay the same, but the substance changes into... uh... "Body-of-Christ-ness." That's why it's called "transubstantiation."

Okay, that's a bit obtuse. Let's just say that having the experience of being in the world as a female at an earlier point must leave something indelible behind.

And I think that those experiences at the other end of the gender continuum, in combination with all those secondary sex characteristics that I love love love (facial hair! baldness! beer guts!) are pretty potent.

Oh yeah. I also an often enthralled by butch lesbians.

Remember Leslie B. Feinberg? She wrote an amazing book back in the Eighties called Stone Butch Blues, about being a butch lesbian in Buffalo, New York, during the middle of the Twentieth Century. I once met Leslie B. Feinberg at some queer social event, and spent some time pretty much throwing myself at her thinking that I was throwing myself at him.

And it doesn't have to be the case that there's a trompe l'oeil thing going on. I've always been drawn to butch lesbians, even the ones who are obviously women.

Oh. And one of the best experiences I've ever had whipping a boy--sometimes I think the all time best--was a scene where the boy was the mother of a five year old.

And of course, in the SM realm, someday I'm going to come up behind girlfag, yank her by the hair so it hurts, and growl into her ear, "You're mine now bitch," and proceed to flog her, giving it all I've got. (I have it from a very reliable source that the grabbing-by-the-hair thing may cause girlfag to cum right then and there.)

What would it be like to take a woman to bed?

I came close a few times in high school and college, but never... uh... went all the way.

In terms of my experience, I'm a Kinsey 6.

Huh.

Would I still maintain my Kinsey 6 status if I got it on with a transman? The stubble, the musculature, the deep voice whispering in my ear, and that soft skin and the vagina?

Our contemporary understanding of the gender continuum and claiming one's own gender identity doesn't quite lend itself to hair-splitting like that, does it?

And... Uh... I guess they'd kick me out of Inferno.

Oh. No they wouldn't. That's right: there are heterosexual men at Inferno who have regular dealings with cooze. It's just the cooze itself that's not permitted within the sacred apollonian grove.

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