transspinster

Well, another SF Pride has come and gone, and none too soon. Looking at that sentence I just wrote, I have to admit that sometimes I don’t know whether I am a bubbly misanthrope or a crowd-phobic spinster. I suspect that the two are actually the same girl. It’s not that I object to LGBT people having pride; I am not one of those righteous people who want to shit on political progress by advocating “Gay Shame.” Still, I’ve always been the girl who could never stand carnivals, fairs, or amusement parks, so any event that offers grilled meats on sticks and brightly colored free crap, I’ve always given a polite No Thank You to.

But this year, Pride felt different, a little worse than usual. I’d been having a shitty week emotionally, so I decided to forgo Dyke March, which is the one Pride event that I always brave through my agoraphobia/ demophobia. I’d whittled down my Pride celebrating to just one sleek minimalist bauble: volunteering as donations-collector on Pink Saturday. My dear friends Tara and Angie asked me to volunteer to raise money for Skate Like a Girl, or SLAG, a great non-profit organization that gives structure and support for female skateboarders. No brainer: I agreed, and signed my little sister up for good lesbian cross-identification measure.

The actual physicality of almost three hours spent standing with a bucket-necklace, gently accosting people for a few dollars was not so bad. Neither was the lobster-red-scorching I got as the UV rays penetrated through my flimsy SPF 30 Lancome moisturizer. But I went home feeling a little down.

First, it was a bit depressing how reluctant people are about donating money. Some fags actually gave shady attitude as a donation. “The economy” becomes a convenient excuse for any stinginess now, and it was out in full force Saturday afternoon. People shamelessly and brazenly telling me, “I have no money” while wearing $300 shades and downing Starbucks iced teas. Funny how people cannot donate five dollars to a non-profit but can turn around spend twenty on a stuffed dog made of rainbow fabric.

But more viscerally hurtful was the realization that the identity that we were all celebrating—“GAY”—had no personal meaning for me anymore. The Saturday of hanging out with the gals was great, but it had totally the opposite effect of what an event like Pride is supposed to have: I felt completely alienated from any group identification. Standing out there sloughing through the Pride crowd emphasized to me this sense of slipping through LGBT cracks.

Knowing I’d be participating, however peripherally, in a mainstream gay event, I prepared carefully my gender performativity Saturday morning. I contemplated wearing black lipstick, but nixed it: too costume-y, too adherent to the already carnivale-esque ethos of the event. A Meatmen tee shirt? Too much of a middle finger to homo-politics. Five-inch platform Chloé combat boots? Naw, I do have to stand for three hours. So I ended up assembled as you see in the above pic: old Chuck Taylor sneaks, old-man black wool socks, sawed-off Dickies workpants, Chloé aviator sunglasses, and the gay pièce-de-resistance: vintage Madonna tee shirt from 1992, with a full-body silkscreen of a Steven Meisel photo from the Erotica album art sessions.

While I got complemented multiple times for the tee shirt, its flagrant gayness only emphasized the emotional slippage I felt from gayness. I have become this illegible text. I look like a girl from a few miles away, but you can’t miss the gigantic knot of bone on my throat when you get up close—and certainly not the bass voice that comes out of it. But then, I make no efforts to pass as a girl. My femininity is an instinct and a psyche-preserving bodily function, not an attention-getting mechanism. I am not offended when mistaken for a girl, nor am I offended when the guy selling me smokes calls me “sir.” But Saturday, gatekeeping the Pride festival, I got to be juxtaposed and be read by a multitude of sexually-identified beings, and I felt no kinship to any of them. I was a long-haired fag wearing a vintage Madonna shirt, but really, I felt like this:

...a tranny whose big boobs are only in her photoshop dreams. After being an out proud gay man for nearly 15 years, the phrase “gay man” had become a foreign language to me. To use “gay man” to describe my body and psyche feels totally wrong. But this leaves me bodyless. I don’t feel like a gay man, but I am a homosexual genetic male; I feel like a femme dyke but I am not a lesbian (no sexual desire for women); I feel a close kinship to transsexuals but I feel pretty happy with the (male) body that I have.

I think I am read as “failed tranny” because my femininity owes more to Courtney Love than Madonna: it is messy, unpolished, comfy. It is more folk song circle than disco lights. And then, my body does not project the phallic radiation that the penis forces upon males, hetero or homo. In her poem, “Outside the Operating Room of the Sex-Change Doctor,” Sharon Olds describes seven penises:

The anaesthetic is wearing off now. The chopped-off sexes lie on the silver tray./ One says I am a weapon thrown down. Let there be no more killing./ Another says I am a thumb lost in the threshing machine. Bright straw fills the air. I will never have to work again. / The third says I am a caul removed from his eyes. Now he can see. / The fourth says I want to be painted by Géricault, a still life with a bust of Apollo, a drape of purple velvet, and a vine of ivy leaves. / The fifth says I was a dirty little dog, I knew he’d have me put to sleep. / The sixth says I am safe. Now no one can hurt me. / Only one is unhappy. He lies there weeping in terrible grief, crying out Father, Father!

To break down the meaning of Olds’ penises:

1. Weapon

2. Tool

3. Blinders

4. Classic homoeroticism

5. Horny animal

6. Self-preservation

7. Son to Daddy

My body doesn't exude any of these seven qualities (except #6, sometimes). Moreover, the seven uses of the penis that an MTF tranny has no use for and thus feels compelled to extricate through surgery, I already feel—with my penis intact. My refusal of these seven uses is the aura that I already use to navigate this world. I am a tranny whose brain is my vagina, but to the outside world, a brain-vagina is not a neo-vagina; thus I am a failed tranny. Another crack through which I fall.

Fall and wander. I’m the kind of tranny who is happy with my cock and flat chest but in my brain, I have a deep vulva...and the monumental boobs of Mariah Carey. I borrowed the chest of my supreme goddess for the photoshop fantasy I created above, but in a moment of ecstatic cultural kismet, it seems that Mariah herself is kind of fascinated by trannies herself. The cover image of her upcoming album is a tranny’s dream celebration of inflatable bra-fillers, and her new video will feature her as a drag king:

In my gender-loneliness, it’s comforting to have Mariah give tranny discourse. But I can’t live on fan-favorite fantasies forever. Will I ever find my own Pride group to parade with? More importantly, will I ever find a husband? I have an inkling suspicion that my destiny is to search for a bisexual man who likes flat-chested trannies. FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!! How do you profile that one on match.com???

stinkbombshell

I love perfumes, and more specifically, the act and idea of wearing perfumes. But I have small nostrils. This leads me to often forget to breathe through my nose, leaves me panting like a dog, and gives me a terrible sense of smell. So my perfume has to be a good strong stinky perfume: one that is rough and tough enough to penetrate my tight little smell-holes. This is why even though I want to tell you about the experience of wearing perfume, I can’t tell you about it in the standard lingo of scent fetishists—I couldn’t tell you the difference between a “top note” and a “bottom note.” (There must be a “bottom note”?) The best way I could find of describing my attraction to bottled stink is to invoke one of my favorite art pieces, Mike Kelley’s series, Empathy Displacement: Humanoid Morphology, in which Kelley placed found rag dolls in black boxes and placed over each a human-sized, two-dimensional rendering of the doll:

And here I am replicating Empathy Displacement: Humanoid Morphology with the black box packaging for a perfume I wear, Nasomatto Absinth:

Kelley has said that the combination of the opaque black box and rendering makes the actual doll physically inaccessible—an inaccessibility which then enhances the viewer’s ability to empathize with the inanimate object. I’m very drawn to this play between tangibility and emotionality: specifically, how the lack of body actually enables a strong emotional reaction. When I wear perfume, I imagine that I am a flat drawing of a doll trapped in a black box: the doll longs to live in the human world—to desire, elicit desire—but cannot because it is an object. I am the human medium that allows the inanimate object of the perfume to live its life. I am its fleshly conduit, and the immaterial physicality contained in glass bottles takes possession of my brain and limbs. The perfume doesn’t represent me; I represent the perfume, its indescribable viscerality.

Materially speaking, a smell is a bit of moisture made into air. It’s not just a thing, it’s nothing; it’s not just nothing, it’s nothing made into an object; it’s nothingness. I love it when I’m looking at a fashion magazine editorial, and at the bottom of the intricate price-and-textile description of the outfit that the model is wearing, it says in brazen incongruity: “Fragrance: Yves Saint Laurent Opium.” We can see the dress, okay, but to give credit to a scent in a two-dimensional photograph? What this reveals is that the concept of wearing a scent is really about wearing an idea. The perfume binds concept to the essential quality of scent. And usually, what is worn when one wears a scent is a concept of gender.

Like most things that pertain to bodies, perfume is gendered: man-spray is not called “perfume” but “cologne.” Moreover, in the bottled scent world, certain smells are considered “feminine” and others “masculine.” But the categorization of floral scents as “feminine” and musky scents as “masculine” is not based on any biological facts of sexuality. Perfumes are not imitation of glandular secretions. I mean, how many women do you know whose tampons smell like rose-petals? Or men whose cum rags smell like leather musk? “Floral” and “musk” are cultural biases about gender that are essentialized (literally) into bottles of liquids.

And yet, I love perfumes for this very essentializing quality. A good perfume is the perfect foundation for genderfucking. For in the public sphere, a man wearing stilettos puts himself in danger, but he can dump on as much Chanel No. 5 as he wants and who’s going to lynch him for his feminine stink? Perfume’s rigidly gendered taxonomy is what actually allows a gender fluidity. When I am wearing a perfume rather than a cologne, and when a woman wears Davidoff Cool Water rather than Chanel No. 5, we are simultaneously paying respect and lip-service to the existent gender meaning—or dare I say, essence—of stink. Our bodies are transformed by the narrative of the scent, but the narrative of the scent is also transformed by our wearing. Perfume may come in rigidly gendered packaging and ad copy, but it must by design be liberated into the ether of the world and become completely formless. This is why, aside from ck one, there are so few truly unisex fragrances: because perfumes have always been hermaphroditic.

Perfumes are genetically metaphorical; they can only function by association. The identity of stink must be wedded to a certain bottle shape, a certain designer, a certain model in the advertising campaign, and finally, a certain person who wears it who has an impact on you in your own life. My first fragrance was Issey Miyake L’Eau D’Issey: strong sharp orange. In 1995, my sister bought it in San Francisco during her first semester of undergrad at Berkeley and gave it to me as a Christmas present. After that, in the late 90s, I wore colognes as a link to certain masculinities I wanted: Boss Hugo Boss because that was the cologne of the boy I was in love with; Gucci Envy for Men because I was trying to be an open-shirted gigolo type fag. The sole exception during those years was the ubiquitous Thierry Mugler Angel, which I wore because its unmistakable chocolate smell expanded my olfactory nerves like a mega-dildo.

For most of the new millennium, I’ve been scentless. Instead of a scent I had a husband. I guess the proxy smell of natural man-stink was enough for me. But since 2006, post-divorce, I’ve been faithful to Tom Ford Black Orchid. And this is the first time that I’d really been attracted to the stink itself, rather than an external association. Black Orchid is sweet, but it is also musky and dank. And it is strong. To me, it is undoubtedly feminine, but it doesn’t at all smell “light,” the way most women’s perfumes smell. I rotate Black Orchid with two other perfumes that are her gangbanger sisters: Nana DeBary Bronze and Nasomatto Absinth, both perfumes that smell sweet but stinkingly so.

My friend Marisa says she feels naked without perfume; I am the same way. If I rush out of the house in the morning without three spritzes of perfume I feel pantless for the rest of the day. Recently, while I was replenishing my Black Orchid at Bloomingdale’s, the well-intending salesgirl suggested I try the new Prada, which was light and perfect for “day,” since my Black Orchid, with its smelly heft, was more of an “evening” scent. I refused to try the Prada with politeness, but what I really wanted to say was, “I will never wear a ‘light’ scent. I will always wear a scent matched for nights because I’m a gal who loves to dress in homeless gear as if it were an evening gown, and having my 30-year old threadbare t-shirts stink like dark evening perfume is like accessorizing with a major jewel or fur. Such a stink is invisible, but makes me feel indelibly feminine.”