TKM

It was without question the nicest doctor’s office I have ever entered. Spare, spacious, and moodlit with rice-paper tower lamps and recessed lights. Four semi-lounge chairs invited clients to settle in and relax with a magazine—Glamour, Allure, Sunset, Wine Spectator—as if one were poolside on a Princess cruise. These reading choices, no doubt selected for their idle browsability, were neatly arrayed on a sturdy coffee table, which itself was centered on an Oriental rug, a real one, not one of those winking acrylic imposters at IKEA that start shedding red fuzz all over your living room 10 minutes after you lay it down. Twelve-inch ocean-colored marbled tile subtly offset soft white walls whose hushed serenity was broken only by three oil paintings bursting with bright colors and a flat-screen TV wall-mounted above a table of brochures advertising Cynosure, Juvéderm, Restylane, and Latisse, the latter of which, I learned, is a treatment for eyelash hypotrichosis, a chilling term for the relatively nonmalignant condition of short eyelashes.

While the wife and I have a DVR and enjoy our ability to fast-forward through commercials—thereby helping to kill the time-honored model of sponsor-driven television we’ve known our entire lives—whenever I see an advertisement flitting by for a pharmaceutical I’ve never heard of I make her back up, because I find novel drugs and their ads tragicomic in a complacently American way. That’s how I learned of the possible side effects of Latisse, whose first-line application is as a glaucoma treatment—we all knew that no scientists actually set out to “cure” short eyelashes; clinicians simply noticed that glaucoma patients who were taking Lumigan, the alter ego of Latisse, to decrease ocular hypertension, which sounds way more painful to me than eyelash hypotrichosis, developed darker pigment in and around their eyes, which made for thicker, longer lashes. Now, look alive, this hyper eyelash growth is not a permanent side effect; eyelash hypotrichosis is as chronic as disappointment and will reassert its bad ass the moment you discontinue use. However, the potential darkening of your iris pigment is likely permanent, so, you know, if the eyes are windows to the soul, your soul will become darker too. Permanently. Just saying. Heaven knows I’m a major consumer of pharma. Still, it seems excessive to me—especially in a world visited by the miracle of mascara—to take a prescription medication for the rest of your life, at a cost of $120 per month, to maintain slightly longer eyelashes, but that’s probably only because I dodged the eyelash hypotrichosis bullet. My eyelashes are quite long. And my irises are already plenty brown.

I could go on about the injectible wrinkle fillers that were on offer, like Juvéderm, Restylane, and Radiesse, any of which promise to usurp your unsightly nasolabial folds (a.k.a. smile lines), melomental folds (creases emanating from the corners of your mouth, or “marionette lines” in aesthetician parlance), crow’s feet, or just about any other mark of a life well-lived—for about six to nine months, after which your body absorbs it and your face resumes its natural joyful state. But one must put her judgmental opinions about necessity and excess aside when entering the previously alien dimension of plastic surgery and injectible/pharmaceutical cosmetology. I was there for the former, or at least for a consult about the former. And it wasn’t just some random plastic surgeon’s den of solicitude. I was in the surgical cosmetology capital of the world, Beverly Hills’ “Golden Triangle” neighborhood, so named for the obscene consumerism and self-righteous privilege that radiate from its Rodeo Drive nucleus like the seductive, combustible rays of the sun. Touch me, skanks.

Longtime readers of this blog may remember, as hard as they’ve tried to forget, that my girls developed in a free-spirited, artistic way, with one big, floppy D-cup accompanied by a little sister two full cup sizes her junior. I would more plainly call this a developmental deformity, but I don’t want yonier-than-thou feminists all up in my grill for not embracing the perfection of my temple. On the contrary, I mask my goddess-given uniqueness, augmenting my dwarfish side with a prosthetic to approximate a chest that fails to alarm strangers.

Though I long ago stepped up from the nylon-covered foam pad of my youth—which had to be surreptitiously wrung out whenever I was so bold as to go swimming—to a silicone insert that conducts at nearly the same bounce rate as its mate when I walk and feels less like a wadded sock to those who hug me, it’s still uncomfortable and prone to slippage, and I’m tired of stealing moments for furtive adjustments. If I were less self-conscious I suppose I could adjust it more brazenly, like men shifting their merchandise in the deli window, but I’m afraid I could never summon up enough attitude to make that maneuver seem like anything but a lonely lesbian awkwardly groping her own tits.

In truth, I’ve just never taken pride of ownership in my chest; inasmuch as I think about my breasts at all, it’s mostly about how to camouflage them—or how much I’d like to not have to think about camouflaging them. I’ve been dreaming about corrective surgery since I was a teenager, but it’s not the kind of procedure one’s HMO covers—I’ve certainly tried to convince mine that they should—and it’s always been beyond the means of my pitifully stagnant income. But lately, catching a draft off the success of my overeducated wife—who has generously begun to cover a larger share of our household expenses with her more dynamic salary—I’ve found myself with greater financial freedom. So, totally taking advantage of my wife’s largesse, I’m blowing my newfound savings on plastic surgery. Good thing I don’t look like a trophy wife. (Give me time: My nasolabial and melomental folds are only getting deeper.)

So why lop off the big boob instead of augmenting the little one? Augmentation is, after all, less expensive, less invasive, and far less scarring—a state of affairs I find corrupt; how else to explain this being one of very few instances in which women are encouraged to want more, and punished for wanting less. I’m sorry, but if surgeons have figured out how to insert and secure 1-kilogram silicone slabs through straw-sized incisions tucked discreetly under the arms, how have they not yet stumbled on a way to decrease breast mass without cutting off our nipples and slicing down and around the mammary like they’re skinning and de-boning chicken breasts?

Still, I do want less. It’s true that as an adolescent I tried exercising only on the right side to increase the breast muscle of my stunted member. It didn’t work. At all. Probably owing to the fact that breasts are composed of milk ducts and fat, neither of which much respond to exercise.  As an adult, well, my personal presentation can be somewhat at odds with itself, with a pronounced disconnect between my chosen aesthetic and my unchosen mammatude; even as my breasts may well be the only characteristic of prove-it-in-your-face womanhood that keeps me from being bounced out of ladies’ restrooms, I’m tired of them lording their bounty over me like some sick cosmic joke.

And isn’t it a wonderful thing that modern medicine has given us ways to “correct” just about anything we find disharmonious to our own big ideas about how we feel we should, want, or deserve to look? (For a staggering fee, the indirect costs of which will be passed along to my wife; good thing I married her when I had the chance.)

I’m tempted here to address the issue of misguided plastic surgery. There are plenty of people who manage to incorrect themselves in their bitchfight with nature, even people who, by virtue of having had, say, a dozen or two or three surgical procedures in their quest to micromanage their genetic code, find themselves featured on A&E, which has lately found its niche in dwelling on the addictions and obsessive compulsions of Americans gripped by PTSD, dysphoria, or even simple ennui. But who am I to say that my boob job is somehow more meritorious than that of the 110-pound 21-year-old who knows in her heart that she was really meant to have F-cup breasts? And if her newfound “self-esteem” opens avenues previously closed to her—like maybe the gates of the Playboy Mansion in Bel-Air…

Or even the stage door at San Bernardino’s Flesh gentlemen’s bar…

Well, then bully for her!

One can look up any number of websites that have little purpose beyond tracking plastic surgery disasters, generally of the celebrity variety because, really, how many uncelebrated people are going to emerge from anonymity simply to say, “Wow, look at this horrifying ‘after’ shot of me! I’m not sure what I was going for, but I sure ended up disfigured!”

Hence, the old saying is particularly applicable here: I didn’t want to just pick somebody out of the phonebook. Not that anybody uses phonebooks anymore. My wife and I occasionally receive a copy of the yellow pages but haven’t cracked one open in years, and when we recently found a white pages volume lying on the doorstep we were momentarily fascinated by the relic, as if an IBM Selectric typewriter had been mysteriously delivered to our side porch.

Needless to say, I had not started my search in the yellow pages. Rather, I asked a transgender professor at my wife’s institution of higher learning whether he could recommend any local plastic surgeons, figuring that surgeons who regularly do “top” surgeries for trans dudes would have no trouble whatsoever with the level of reduction/reconstruction I have in mind.

I had been harboring some concern that maybe someone who spends so much time thinking about breasts—defying mass-to-perk physics ratios, discerning ideal nipple placement, defining perfect cleavage plumb lines—would try to talk me into, if not a straight-up augmentation on the wee side, meeting somewhere in the middle of the two, perhaps at a nice, plump C? Like maybe there’s a whole cadre of surgeons involved in a secret fraternal organization foresworn to protect the worldwide breast population from fallen women like me, like a sort of Operation Rescue for boobs. I didn’t want any contention with my surgeon about desired outcomes, because at a certain critical point in this transaction I’ll be out cold on a table and at the mercy of the surgeon’s mammipulations.

Trans dude having come up empty, I went to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons website, where you can search doctors by surgery type, ZIP Code, etc. I chose “breast reconstruction” and selected a 10-mile radius as my parameter. It returned 194 hits, about 150 of which sported Golden Triangle addresses. Even I can’t believe there’s that much call for boobwork by Angelenos, and I’ve lived among their peculiar breed my whole life.

Daunted, I had to narrow my search down somehow, and of the 194 doctors only a handful had recognizably female names, so I started with them, guessing I was less likely to encounter pushback from a female surgeon. The “patient care consultant” for the first doctor I contacted was friendly and incredibly responsive to follow-up e-mails—though the surgeon’s consultation fee seemed a bit on the absurd precious side. Given that, before setting up a first date I wanted to have a reasonable expectation that we were going to get to second base; I didn’t want to fork over $250 taking a surgeon to dinner only to find that she didn’t want to go to bed with me, or that she had a tacky, shedding IKEA rug. When I expressed concerns to patient care consultant Sonya about whether or not the surgeon and I might be on the same results page, or living in the same financial universe, she invited me to e-mail photos of my breasts, front and profiles, for a preliminary look-see and quote.

Enter dear wife for weirdest photo shoot ever.

You know how you sometimes look at pictures of yourself and say, “Jesus, do I really look like that?” That feeling is amplified in naked photos. I sincerely didn’t think it was possible for me to harbor more dislike for that particular portion of my body, but as I sat editing images of my dysmorphic chest, cropping out all references to my head and happy trail, I couldn’t imagine how I had managed to look past it for so long. Have I had carnival mirrors all this time?

I sent the images to Sonya, resisting the urge to apologize in the body of the e-mail. I’m certain that mine isn’t the first set of amateur, anonymous, totally unsexy naked pics Sonya has been sent, nor will it be the last.

I wonder if guys surfing for free online porn ever look at before-and-after shots of breast augmentations. There seems to be an endless supply out there—most categorized by cup size, which can be pretty handy for the discerning breast man. To get an idea of what my reduction would look like, I had to use the “before” and “after” shots in reverse, flipping, for instance, A-to-D and B-to-D augmentations. This was annoying because I wanted to see an actual surgically enhanced breast in the size I was shopping for: These ragtag A’s and B’s were all just as prolapsed as mine, with none of the lifting and smoothing and precision nipplescaping that I’m hoping for in a finished product. I couldn’t find a single site that pictured a woman who had undergone a reduction with an end-point size below a C cup. Is there really no demand for such a result? Do surgeons just not post those pics because they don’t want to scare away clientele who may be worried about having too much of their womanhood slurped out while comatose? Or are the surgeons members of Operation Brescue?

Knowing that most women get reductions in order to relieve neck and back pain, the scope of these reductions seem startlingly minor to me, sometimes sloughing just a partial cup size. And pictures I’ve found depicting disparity corrections suggest that women overwhelmingly opt for an overall augmentation, with implants of differing sizes equalizing the imbalance. At the end of the day, it seems, everybody wants more, not less. Even kittens.

The online transmission of my own “cheesecake” pics—which felt weird enough; I can’t imagine e-mailing a naked picture of myself with my head attached. I guess that’s what separates me from the TMI generation, who gamely engage in sexting and then seem genuinely surprised when, post-breakup, their ex-boyfriends disseminate the nudie shots to anyone with a cell phone. Gah, I clearly wrote FYEO right there in the subject line!

But now I guess I know how those girls feel. I received no further correspondence from Sonya, not even when I followed up five days later to ask whether the doctor had had a chance to view the pics, adding, solicitously, “Now that I’ve decided to give myself this gift, I’m very excited to move forward with it.”

Nope. Nothing. Sonya may at this very moment be sending pictures of my tits to her entire e-mail address book. Subject line: OMG, so FUBAR!

But I wouldn’t let Sonya’s rejection dissuade me. I simply moved on to girlfriend doctor number two, who seemed more qualified than the last anyway, carrying board certification in both surgery and plastic surgery; her office asked for the less precious consultation fee of $125. And her patient care consultant, Nadia, informed me that a patient had just canceled an appointment two weeks out and would I like to see the doctor then? Yes, I really, really would!

Which brings us back to me, sitting in a semi-lounge chair in a moodlit office not reading a fluffy magazine, surrounded by brochures for injectible cosmetic enhancements, waiting for my name to be called, hoping this doctor would be the one.

To be continued…

The following is a letter I wrote to my family, sent today, six days before a ballot initiative comes before California voters that has been described by the pro–marriage equality camp as “Gettysburg,” and by the anti–marriage equality folks as “Armageddon.” And the Hyperbole Award goes to…  

Dear Friends—

Well, e-mail may seem like a clumsy way to announce this, but Elizabeth and I got married. We had to act quickly to make sure we were legal ahead of the November 4 election—just in case Proposition 8 passes and closes the door on same-sex marriage—and we did so quietly because, after being together for 14 years, we already felt married.

But now I have to admit, actually being legally married does feel different.

In the absence of legal recognition, Elizabeth and I defined our relationship for years on our own terms. Then when California introduced a domestic-partnership registry in 1999, we went downtown and signed up for the handful of benefits it offered at the time. Over the years California legislators fought to expand our rights under that registry such that, by 2007, domestic partnership was practically identical to marriage—except in name. And that difference in name was a constant reminder that in the eyes of the state, our relationship fell under a category of recognition that held us separate from our relatives and so many of our friends.

Now that artificial separation is erased, and this joy I feel being married represents something far more profound than a shift in nomenclature: It’s the realization of true equality, and it’s been a long time coming!

I hope that you don’t mind my using the occasion of my marriage announcement to politick just a little bit, because these feelings could be very short-lived if Proposition 8 wins. Honestly, there’s never been an initiative on the California ballot more threatening to my ongoing rights and happiness. As a family member, you’ve always treated me as a first-class citizen, and I have every reason to think that you’re in favor of the state treating me likewise. Still, given that so many voters have reservations about same-sex marriage based on what the initiative’s supporters have been saying, I can’t let this election pass without addressing the topic directly with those who care most about me.

A few truths:

First, neither the California Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of same-sex marriage nor Prop. 8 will have any effect on what is taught in schools. The state superintendent of public schools has himself appeared in television spots to assure voters that curriculum will not be affected in any way, and the California Teachers Association explains in a press release: “Proposition 8 will not affect teaching in our schools. That’s a lie crafted to scare people into voting for Proposition 8 and stripping Californians of rights they already have. Not one word in Prop. 8 mentions education, and no child can be forced, against the will of their parents, to be taught anything about health and family issues at school. California law prohibits it.”

Second, the marriage ruling has nothing to do with adoption laws. In California, same-sex couples are allowed to adopt children, and Prop. 8’s passage would have no effect on the state adoption code. The defeat of Prop. 8, however, would have a profound positive effect on the children of same-sex parents. Granting gay and lesbian couples the privileges and benefits of civil marriage, far from posing harm to families, affords the children of same-sex couples the same advantages and stable family structures that children of opposite-sex couples already enjoy. Approximately 60,000 children are currently being raised by same-sex parents in the state of California; it’s frankly impossible to reconcile sincere concern for the welfare of children and families with a concurrent rejection of this population’s needs for equivalent benefits and security.

Third, the Supreme Court ruling was not the work of “four activist judges.” Three of the four judges who voted to affirm same-sex marriage were appointed by Republican governors, and they weren’t creating “special rights” for gays and lesbians—they were recognizing the equal rights and protections already present in the California state constitution for all citizens. Prop. 8’s supporters say that such things should be decided by the people, not the courts, and in a perfect world, I would agree. Unfortunately, gays and lesbians are a tiny minority—about 6%, by latest estimates—and a historically unpopular one at that. The most sacred trust of the court is to protect the interests of minorities from an unsympathetic or unknowing majority, and this court took that tenet to heart. Sadly, Prop. 8 needs only a simple majority of 50% + 1 to reverse the court’s ruling and its protections for my community.

Fourth, marriage equality poses no threat to religious freedom in California. No church or minister of any sort can be compelled to marry anyone, gay or straight.

Lastly, a domestic partnership is not the same thing as a marriage. If it were, it wouldn’t need a different name.

If Prop. 8 passes, legal consensus says that my marriage to Elizabeth will likely stand, along with the 11,000 other same-sex marriages that have taken place since June 17 in what has been an incredible summer of love for same-sex couples, but our feeling of first-class citizenship would be diminished. Relegating gays and lesbians to a second class is what this constitutional amendment seeks to do, singling out a minority population and stripping them of civil rights that all other citizens enjoy.

Before 1998, when Alaska passed the nation’s first state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage by majority ballot vote, no constitution in the United States had ever been amended to rescind rights from a law-abiding segment of the population. It should have been impossible to do such a thing in America, but since then, 25 other states have passed similar constitutional amendments—largely through campaigns employing scare tactics that targeted gays and lesbians as a threat to American families and values—and this year, amendments are on ballots in Florida, Arizona, and California. I hope you’ll join me on Election Day in telling the rest of the nation that those kinds of scare tactics just won’t work here, and that that kind of discrimination is impossible in California.

Thank you for your love and support.

And please, if you feel that I deserve the same rights that you do, forward this e-mail to your friends—or, blog visitors, send a link! I feel strongly that people of all political and religious persuasions believe foremost in honesty, and however emotionally close to this issue I am, I think all will find that I’ve presented the facts plainly and truthfully.  

In a joint press conference held Thursday morning in Washington, D.C., leaders of the Brigadoon Republicans, a gay conservative political action group, and the International Brotherhood of Unicorns announced that they are joining forces in the interest of greater visibility and increased political leverage.

“This is a great moment for both of our causes,” announced a man in a coat and tie who preferred that his name be kept off the record because he’s not out to his family. “We have so much in common with unicorns everywhere, constantly having our veracity questioned, our sincerity doubted, our lives ridiculed. And we love their logo!”

“We’re really looking forward to this new partnership,” affirmed IBU executive director Bedazzle at the press conference. “But not in a gay way. We’re not gay.”

Buttercup, president of the unicorn-agnosticism organization Stop Horning Around, which staged a protest near the press conference, charges that IBU isn’t a political action organization at all but rather a “group of single-minded extremists working to enforce their own belief system in the name of naked self-interest.”

“That’s so offensive to us,” said Bedazzle. “We stand for so much more than proselytizing people to believe as we do. We happen to advocate for small government and lower taxes. Also, can security please get this child off of me!”

Brigadoon Republicans members wore unicorn masks to show solidarity with IBU members, whose platform they say they fully embrace. “We’re really on point with IBU and are looking forward to joining them in their lobbying efforts,” said a spokesman. “We’re hoping to bring a male, Christian, post-adolescent voice to the age-old struggle for unicorn recognition.”

Asked whether he thought lesbian members of his organization might help bridge the gender gap in unicorn acceptance, the Brigadoon Republicans spokesman replied, “We don’t believe in lesbians.”

You know that urban legend that says if you’re out for a pleasant night drive and you see a car with its lights off, DON’T FLASH YOUR BRIGHTS AT THE CAR, because, the legend goes, it could be a gang initiation wherein thugs drive around in the noir until they encounter a driver courteous enough to signal them, at which time THEY WILL KILL YOU DEAD!

The frequency with which that cautionary tale is circulated and cited as fact speaks volumes about the American psyche: Think twice about drawing attention to yourself among strangers, however friendly your intentions, because you may be singling yourself out for attack!

Well, I flashed my brights at the Episcopal Church via a December 19 Advocate.com commentary praising the gay- and lesbian-inclusive platform its leaders and members have embraced over the last several decades, a movement that reached a boiling point with the 2003 consecration of V. Gene Robinson, an openly gay and actively partnered priest, as bishop of New Hampshire. The church has since been wracked by conflict both internal—several dozen conservative U.S. congregations and one entire diocese have left the national body in protest—and external, with the worldwide body to which the church belongs, the Anglican Communion, threatening in fits and starts to cut the whole darn U.S. province adrift. Much more detail can be read in the essay itself, should you be so inclined.

Mine was meant as a friendly flick of the brights, a little shout-out to the church’s presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, who has held the progressive line despite enormous pressure to back down, and its beleaguered members, the majority of whom favor an inclusive church even if such a platform visits uncertainty and strife on their denomination. In recognizing and praising the national church’s vanguard position, of course, I noted its fallout, including the recent secession of that aforementioned diocese (in my own home state of California, no less), an unprecedented event within the church that underlines the recalcitrant position of Anglican traditionalists, many of whom habitually drive about with darkened headlights and a frank willingness to lash out at those who threaten to illuminate the world beyond their frosted windshield.

Given the Advocate.com audience, I anticipated a largely LGBT readership, thus vastly underestimating the Internet’s powers of dissemination. Remarking on the commentary’s Web traffic the day after it was posted, our digital media director said that the piece was logging the kind of numbers we typically see only on breaking news of, say, homophobic Republican senators caught in flagrante delicto with gents in public toilets. And you can’t just make that shit up; we have to wait—sometimes months between occurrences—for such gifts from the news gods.

Happily, most of my traffic was of a friendly persuasion. Plenty of nice Episcopalians, both gay and straight, clicked through from links on progressive blogs; several even took time to drop me an e-mail noting how gratifying it was to see a story acknowledging a straight Christian voice in matters of LGBT social justice. But links to my commentary inevitably also landed in a couple of inhospitable Web neighborhoods, the kind of places where we dykes and faggots had best drive through quickly if at all, lest the thuggish local holy men shoot out our headlights and smite us under cloak of darkness.

When my commentary came to the attention of members at a certain conservative Anglican blog, I was subject to much disliking. (I’m given to understand, courtesy of the aforementioned conservative Anglicans, that gay and lesbian folks overuse the word hate because, in truth, we relish victimhood. So chastised, I won’t be throwing that word around here, nope, not even when speaking of the only emotion I can think of that could possibly inspire random heterosexuals to spend such significant amounts of their limited time on this earth contemplating and communicating the kind of vitriolic hate not-liking speech that springs from the mouths of homo haters dislikers—other than that stultifying fear among certain types of their own inclination toward the love that dare not speak its name.)

What surprised me about the response among conservatives was the personal chord struck by their hatred disliking. Of course I knew when I published the piece that at least a few traditionalists would see it, and of course I knew they would like it not one bit; the commentary lionizes those very stances of the Episcopal Church that make its detractors go absolutely nuclear. But I think I did a fairish job of presenting the facts as well as my opinions without resorting to personal attacks, so I suppose I expected an in-kind response. If any. I mean, really, who the hell am I that those concerned with the serious work of calibrating the nation’s moral compass should waste energy shouting me down?

It took just four comments at the aforementioned blog for its readers to regress from parsing my text to parsing my appearance. From there, nearly half of the 31 comments to the link were concerned with, first, whether I was a boy or a girl, and second—after they deftly worked out that my first name, Teresa, and my self-identification as a lesbian indicated girlness—how much I didn’t look like a girl. Friends, I have met the enemy, and it attends junior high school.

The emphasis on my appearance seemed especially odd since I didn’t say one word about what John-David Schofield, the bishop who led the secession movement in central California, looks like:

But why go to town on a man’s appearance when there’s so much to say about his actions? Namely, that he has betrayed the will of his own denomination by refusing ordination to women, railing against gay and lesbian inclusion in the church, and operating an “ex-gay” ministry through his cathedral—naturally, he is himself a closeted homo (another factoid I didn’t mention in the commentary), having gone on record as an “ex-gay” years ago in an interview his followers now deny exists. But really, isn’t it more of a surprise these days when a virulently antigay leader isn’t a great big closet case?

Regardless of whether parishioners in crystal cathedrals ought to throw stones, they did so with delight—during a week in which I hope they also found time to celebrate the birth of their lord and savior. At one point the discussion addressed the likelihood that my appearance and orientation indicated a history of sexual abuse, an incredibly popular trope among the religious right—Google “childhood sexual abuse” and “lesbian” and your top hits will be “studies” conducted by fundamentalist organizations showing that a lesbian orientation is practically a gift with purchase of molestation. Was the poster asking the others to lay off discussing my appearance in deference to that probability, or was he gamely making sport of sexual abuse survivors? I’m honestly not sure, but I’m certain that the only time it’s appropriate for a stranger to bring up the possibility of my or anyone else’s sexual abuse history is never.

I responded by flicking my brights again, helpfully providing the Anglican blog community with a link to my earlier essay about gender, seeing as how they were so very interested in sussing out mine. Then a funny thing happened: The comments sort of petered out. Oh, sure, there was the peanut gallery member who countered with a link to an article about female aggression and lack of maternal behavior among spotted hyenas, appearing to suggest that, like the hyenas, women like me might be successfully treated with anti-androgen drugs to curb our masculine aggression (omigod, if they only knew how not aggressive I am) and cultivate feminine behaviors. A second poster brought up another popular conservative trope: that they don’t so much hate dislike homos, they just don’t understand why we always have to run around flaunting our relationships.

I know, right? It’s nearly impossible to go to mainstream movies or read popular books without being subjected to same-sex love story after same-sex love story. We lucky homosexuals grow up in environments where our sexuality is constantly reinforced as the norm.

To add homosexual insult to heterosexual injury, a person can’t go anywhere without seeing us engaged in acts of explicit physical affection!

If only we homos could just step back for a moment, we might recognize that ours isn’t the only valid kind of relationship.

Hey, your god just called. He hates dislikes disingenuousness.

Despite the aforementioned couple of stragglers, about 15 minutes after I announced my presence at the hateful dislikeful blog, the theretofore spirited commentary on my androgen-laden hyena-like ways ceased. Were the sanctimonious creeps turned off by the idea that their words didn’t appear to hurt me? Were they legitimately embarrassed to discover that I was privy to their ugliness? Or were they simply not interested in having an actual conversation with participation not strictly limited to those who completely agree with them?

Among many brilliant things le domestique has been heard to say, one of my favorites is, “The Internet slices people too thin.” Whatever personal inclination we want to feed—liberal or conservative, gay or straight, secular or religious, cat or dog, Mac or PC—there are scores of blogs and discussion boards online where we can get precisely the information and resonance we think we need. Such a sense of belonging is truly wonderful. But as the ease and abundance of access draws communities of common interest closer together, it pushes camps who disagree ever further apart, because increasingly, if we don’t want to, we don’t ever have to talk to anyone we don’t already completely agree with. It doesn’t bode well for the promotion of an open society. (For an accounting of 21st-century regressions of liberties and attitudes in the United States, read Naomi Wolf’s essay “Ten Steps to Close Down an Open Society” at the Huffington Post. It’s a chilling reminder of how far we’ve strayed from what most people think of as incontrovertible U.S. ideals.)

My flirtation with the Episcopal Church had consequences both expected and unexpected. While I have made much of the negative reactions by traditionalists, the positive response was tenfold the negative. Never has my writing been so profoundly rewarded as by the gratification and fellowship I’ve felt with Episcopalian readers these last couple of weeks. Confronting that same firewall of depersonalization their conservative counterparts sought so lamely to penetrate, many progressive Christians simply flicked their brights back at me to acknowledge that my gesture was well-received. Those who pulled over to invite me to their churches did so not to pressure or proselytize but to let me know that their doors would always be open.

To clarify, I have not had a religious epiphany. Nor can you expect me anytime soon to gift you with a New Testament—or even an Amy Grant album. This secular humanist doesn’t expect to undergo a faith makeover in the foreseeable future. But I have experienced a shift in my attitude toward Christianity. After a decade of static from the religious right, I had developed a bone-splintering knee-jerk reaction to the ecclesiastically inclined. I didn’t cultivate it, but I didn’t deny it oxygen either—like most people I seek online resources and news stories that reinforce my worldview, and, well, being an atheist sometimes makes me feel like a freak, like I’m missing something that everyone else sees, and feeling like a freak can make a person a little defensive, especially when religious organizations are actively distributing free bumper stickers condemning my right to equality.

Like the conservative Anglicans I encountered, I too had become a bit blinkered to the idea that a monolithic concept—in my case Christianity, in theirs homosexuality—is best viewed in full light of the individuals who give it life. I’ve since been reminded that for every Christian who dims his headlights to get a bead on his enemy, there are many more who understand that true humanitarianism is contingent on communication with people outside one’s immediate faith and social circles. In this age of increasing polarity I’m grateful that such people exist at all, and even more grateful that so many of them flicked their brights back at me to signal that my message was well met—and perhaps also to let me know that those shadowy thugs in the next car, for all the dire warnings we’ve heard of their quick and powerful wrath, are only threatening if we give credence to their legends and thus snuff our own lights.

L.A.’s last country music radio station, after 25 years serving that market, switched formats August 17. If I seem a little slow on the uptake on this one, it’s only because I had no idea anything of the sort had transpired until Saturday, when I went for a haircut and was filled in on the news by my gay black West Hollywood hairdresser, who’s despondent over the loss.

“When I went out for coffee the other day I heard strains of Carrie Underwood and started following the SUV she was coming from,” he said, doing a little Frankenstein monster walk to illustrate his blind desperation.

When I asked what format the station had switched to, he spat, “Hip-hop R&B crap,” then he joked that his “people” were after him, that they’d heard about some black guy listening to KZLA and just wouldn’t stand for it.

My hairdresser certainly isn’t the only one in distress. “I almost threw up, I was so upset,” said longtime KZLA listener Ruth Rogers, according to the Los Angeles Times. “I think it’s racist.”

Really, Ms. Rogers? What kind of racism would that be? The 53-year-old Orange County resident continued, “This is becoming a nation of minorities. I’m not going to turn on my radio anymore. Country music promotes patriotism and family values, and they’ve replaced it with something that just promotes money and hate.”

Oh, that kind of racism.

I’m not what I would call a country music fan, though I do like country music. I’m sure you get the distinction. The appellation “country music fan” just has too much baggage, an unpretty, jingoistic, Republican, NASCAR vibe. A Ms. Rogers, not-my-demographic vibe. So while I have a fair amount of classic country and country-influenced singer-songwriters in my music library, I hesitate to tell anyone that I like country music.

In truth, I was raised on the stuff, back when Southern California had any number of stations to choose from. My mom leaned toward KFOX, which played a mix of contemporary and classic country, and our radio was always on. Always—even when everybody was watching TV. It was all I knew for years. Very much like Chinese food in China is just “food,” country music to me was “music,” and as a kid I loved calling the radio station with special requests, first asking Mom what she wanted to hear then ringing them up. I was put on the air a few times, probably because the DJ thought it both disturbing and cute that a kid was asking for songs with titles like “Barrooms to Bedrooms” (among my mother’s souvenirs there’s a cassette tape of me requesting this very song, recorded straight off the radio with my boxy portable cassette player).

Through both subliminal and active processing, I absorbed quite a lot, and I can sing you a startling number of 1970s country songs, a talent on display this weekend as my partner witnessed the full extent of my childhood inculcation into the country music fold.

“You don’t remember ‘Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man’? Conway and Loretta?” I asked, with the proper amount of shock, then tried to jog her memory by singing the hook.

“Hey! Looziana woman, Mississippi man
We get together any time we can
Mississippi River can’t keep us apart
There’s too much love in this Mississippi heart
Too much love in this Looziana heart.”

Blank expression.

We were in her Little Blue Truck™, leaving a local shoppertainment center. Before lunch we had gone to one of my favorite previously owned CD stores to search for the latest Hem album and a decent George Jones & Tammy Wynette hits package. Hem was swiftly located—and bargain-priced because the young people who work at the store have no idea who Hem is—but the only George & Tammy collection they had was a three-CD set, which I passed on. I’m not sure anyone needs that much G & T. After lunch I drifted into Tower Records, located at the aforementioned shoppertainment complex, in search of same. There were no George & Tammy CDs to be had, but I did emerge with hits collections from Porter Wagoner & Dolly Parton and Conway Twitty & Loretta Lynn. (Country convention demands that the man’s name be cited first.)

My present fixation with country music duets was sparked by the recent Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris album All the Roadrunning. It’s been in my car’s CD deck for months, spinning down only on rare occasions, when even I have to admit that it’s becoming the aural equivalent of wallpaper. I’m a longtime Harris fan, so I was destined to like the collaboration—inasmuch as anything she touches rates somewhere between pleasant and transcendent on my very subjective scale of liking. As an Associated Press reviewer noted, “Emmylou Harris would sound good matched with a singing hinge.” He went on to dismiss the album as lacking chemistry. I couldn’t disagree more.

All the Roadrunning is one of those albums that took a few listens before I embraced it with ferocity, then I was surprised at how much I liked Knopfler’s songs—all originals—and vocals (his fretwork always being unassailable). But the way they came together with alternating sincerity and playfulness is what really won me, and their interplay reminded me of some of the great country duet partnerships.

Whatever happened to country music power couples anyway?

Through the 1970s, country radio was lousy with duets, and they weren’t isolated tracks from otherwise solo albums, they were from dedicated duet albums, from superstar singing partners who were often dating or married—making their songs of love and loss that much more resonant.

Remember?

If you don’t, you have something in common with my partner.

“How about George & Tammy’s ‘Two Story House’?” I asked, quoting its bouncy refrain: “ ‘How sad it is we now live in a two-story house.’ ”

“Why is it sad that they live in a two-story house?” she asked flatly.

“Because there’s no love about,” I said, solemnly. “They strove so hard for success, they had no time for each other and they fell out of love.” Then I broke into song again:

“I’ve got my story
And I’ve got mine too
How sad it is
We now live in a two-story house.”

Silence.

“You see,” I said helpfully, “they each have their own story about what went wrong, and they also each have their own story.”

“Yeah, I get the complicated layers of meaning,” she said, with no small amount of sarcasm. “But no, I’ve never heard the song.”

“ ‘Golden Ring’?” I offered, not even pausing this time before singing the final chorus.

“Golden ring (golden ring) with one tiny little stone
Cast aside (cast aside) like the love that’s dead and gone
By itself (by itself) it’s just a cold metallic thing
Only love can make a golden wedding ring.”

I studied her face for a glimmer of recognition and found none.

“Sweetie, I didn’t grow up in your mother’s house,” she said.

For years I had been under the delusion that these songs were ubiquitous, part of our collective American experience, our national fabric. Come to find out, not everyone grew up under the unrelenting influence of country radio. Weird.

Weirder still, I had failed to notice the long, slow death of country radio in my own hometown.

“The Los Angeles radio market is basically 40% Hispanic, 11% Asian, and 8% black, and country fans are about 98% Caucasian,” said Rick Cummings, a top executive at KZLA’s parent company, Emmis Communications Corp., according to the Times. “My job is to attract as large an audience as possible.”

And so it was that immediately following rush hour on the morning now known unironically as “Black Thursday” by KZLA listeners—who call themselves KZLAnation—the morning drive show DJ was reportedly told to segue from the Keith Urban track he was playing to a Black Eyed Peas song, after which he and his fellow staff members were let go.

I know from experience that format changes are as a rule executed unceremoniously. For three golden years, 1994–1997, 101.9 KSCA played an “adult album alternative” format that won my heart. For the first time since high school I felt like a radio station “got” me, that I was part of a recognized demographic who liked singer-songwriters and artists who blended elements of rock and folk and pop and soul and jazz and country into music that sometimes defied categorization and almost always ducked the top 40. Then one day I turned the ignition in my car and Spanish-language programming filled my interior; my little bright spot on the dial was gone forever.

While I understand that my piddling singer-songwriter demographic isn’t an advertising magnet, the death of country radio is more curious. Los Angeles reportedly accounts for 3% of all country music sales nationwide, making it the number 1 sales market in the genre for most major record labels. The very night KZLA crooned its last, Faith Hill and Tim McGraw played their first of three sold-out nights at the Staples Center: capacity 20,000. That’s a lot of cowboy boots for a supposedly urban market. Sure, on any one of those three nights I could likely have rolled a bowling ball from one end of the arena to the other without hitting a Democrat, but still, those folks deserve a radio station too. It placates them.

“What will all the Republicans listen to?” I asked my hairdresser.

“Now, now,” said my demographic-defying friend. “They’re not all like that.”

I couldn’t help but notice that when he talked about KZLA listeners and country music fans, he said “they,” not “we.”

Country music is appealing, I think, in a broader way than it’s marketed. The audience doesn’t have to be 98% Caucasion, nor should anyone who likes country be made to feel like an outsider for being black or gay or Democratic or antiwar—or for not appreciating a goddamn car race.

I don’t miss KZLA, whose play list was dominated by your Tim McGraws, your Brad Paisleys, your Gretchen Wilsons—whoever was hot at any given moment. Even my mom had stopped listening to the radio long before the death of KZLA, her taste having gone completely retro. She’s resorted to a mail-order catalog (with no Web presence—that old-school) called Country Music Memories, where she can purchase Boxcar Willie, Stanley Brothers, and Ferlin Husky CDs with abandon.

Me, I prefer your Donna Fargos, your Loretta Lynns, your Bobbie Gentrys, and to Tammy Wynette I guess I’d have to say, Tammy why not? So I do miss country radio, at least in theory. I miss the radio of my youth, when it was just “music.”

By the way, if anyone knows a gay country music lover in SoCal who’s available, my hairdresser is tall, fit, and handsome. He does a mean two-step, and he’s a Democrat.

It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be—nor was it as “bad” as I thought it would be, like, you know, bad in a good way. I had put it off for years, always making excuses when confronted with the issue: “Oh, I have other plans” or “I can’t afford it today” or “I’d love to, but I’ve given up food.”

Nevertheless, I knew that one day I would have to go to Hooters.

Working for the Gay Agenda™ as I do, one might expect that it would be all too easy for me to enjoy a Hooters-free lifestyle. Au contraire! Ever since the chain opened a Hollywood Boulevard location, just steps from my office building, I’ve been under enormous pressure to submit to the traffic-cone-orange NASCAR-dadness of it all.

My gay male coworkers, it seems, can’t get enough of the joint—and the Hooters Girls can’t get enough of them. The gay boys wink at the HGs conspiratorially: We get it, they seem to communicate telepathically, we can appreciate the irony and campy theatricality of the situation. And we will wildy overtip you.

But the scenario is far more charged for a lesbian since many, though not all, straight women believe that all lesbians want them, and these women, the ones who think lesbians indiscriminately lust after all women, seem alternately fascinated and repulsed by the idea of being an object of lust for women, even if they’ve gone out of their way to objectify themselves to the world at large.

So when I walk into Hooters—as I was compelled to do Friday when my very best work friend chose to celebrate his final day at the company with a heaping plate of hot wings—my whole demeanor has to say, “I’m so not here for the scenery,” which isn’t hard for me, because Hooters Girls are so not my type*.

*A word on “my type”: A coworker of mine used to constantly bring magazines to my desk to show me “hot” girls, trying to suss out what he must have judged my unfathomably peculiar taste in women. I would shake my head and send him away every time, thinking that he’d one day realize he wasn’t going to find my dream girl in the pages of Maxim, but the dear boy kept trying, for all his effort managing only to further delineate the difference between gay male and lesbian ideals of womanhood. (For the record I’ll state here that I have on more than one occasion admired a dyke from afar only to realize on closer inspection, and with a fair amount of chagrin, that I’m sizing up a boy—and one who might be underage at that.) Suffice to say that my type, inasmuch as I’ll cop to having one, would not be invited back for a second interview at the Hooters hiring fair.

Once seated, though, I thought Hooters seemed like almost any other noisy, gimmicky chain restaurant, the main difference being that the wait staff was far less dispirited than the typical white-shirted and aproned college kids who might inhabit the Planet Hollywood galaxy. Our server, Danetra, was friendly and enthusiastic, and three other Hooters Girls who stopped by—it’s a sort of tradition, I gather, that HGs visit parties outside their own stations to spread the love, signing your table ticket while they mingle—were equally bubbly, and not in an airheaded way. I imagine we might have collected more HG autographs had we been a party of businessmen instead of three gay guys and two women, but we were shown quite enough attention for my taste, and the attention was kind, not teasing or demeaning—to us or to the HGs in question.

At the end of the day I was left to question why I had stood my anti-Hooters ground so fervently.

Could be that I was brought up in a family atmosphere where any display of female sexuality was characterized as exploitative and demeaning. Watching movies with my mom as a kid, I dreaded any hint of female nudity. A single exposed breast would turn her mood dark, her sudden, palpable anger throwing the whole family in to a state of discomfort. And need I note that she had absolutely no tolerance for the idea that a man really might read Playboy for the articles?

I remember being in the car with her once, I was maybe 13, when she spotted a nasty magazine lying in the middle of a busy street. She wheeled the car around and approached it as slowly as she could given the traffic—maybe 15 mph—and she instructed me to open the car door and pick it up as we passed over it. You have to hand it to her precision driving—she positioned the car perfectly so that I could open the door and scoop up the offending literature without a hitch.

Imagine our surprise when we saw that the flesh she had spotted from a moving car belonged to a fully erect man and that the magazine was Honcho, a gay men’s skin mag. We laughed as she sped away, feeling conspiratorial, like we had not only performed an important anti-smut service but were being a little naughty ourselves in the bargain. On our way home we drove through the alley behind a grocery store to dispose of the magazine in their gigantic garbage bin—she didn’t want any neighbors to find it in our trash—but we furtively flipped through its pages before tossing it away, embarrassed and thrilled by its contents.

During my brief, brilliant career as a copywriter in gay male erotica, I found myself equivocating: Men are exhibitionists, I reasoned, and there’s nothing exploitative in providing an arena for their exhibitionism. But it strikes me now that defining displays of male sexuality as mutually agreed upon exhibitionism and female displays as exploitation is terribly anti-feminist. It discredits any female who cares to exhibit her sexuality, and doubly objectifies women who participate in erotica—or work at Hooters—by discounting their free will. Women are too complicated to be sorted into my mother’s absolute categories of saints, whores, and victims.

I actually like Hooters of America’s coy “Who, us?” corporate stance on their image, as taken from the “about” section on their official site: “The chain acknowledges that many consider ‘Hooters’ a slang term for a portion of the female anatomy. Hooters does have an owl inside its logo and uses an owl theme sufficiently to allow debate to occur over the meaning’s intent. The chain enjoys and benefits from this debate.”

Despite any grudging slack I’ve extended toward Hooters since my fateful Friday lunch, I’m not sure I’d ever be inclined to go back. The food was ordinary and overpriced, like almost any other noisy, gimmicky chain restaurant, and I had a tough time finding menu items that weren’t deep-fried. But Hooters Girls, while still not my type, are another story entirely. I think I’d be happy to hang out with just about any of them anytime. And if they promise not to jump to any unfounded conclusions about my trying to get inside their little orange shorts, I promise to give full faith and credit to their judicious exercise of free will.

I come to you today from Latte Litchfield in South Carolina, where the partner and I vacation with her parents annually. We’re not actually vacationing at the coffee house but at a beach house about a half mile from here, a house that, as it turns out, has Internet access–sadly, that feature wasn’t advertised in the brochure, so we didn’t bring our laptop. Question: Had you a beach house to rent, which features would you highlight in addition to the obvious, i.e. oceanfront beach access, A/C, and the like? For instance, if it had an elevator and wireless Internet, would you gloss those amenities and instead use your precious brochure space to talk up the plantation shutters?

That being said, Internet access is only 10 cents per minute here at Latte Litchfield, and I get to sip a delicious java chip blended mocha as I blog, so all is well. Besides, last year the rental computers were located smack underneath two giant Ten Commandments tablets mounted on the wall. The tablets are still here, but the computers have been moved across the room. Still, I’ll do my best to post morally. What would Jesus write?

While Jesus, with a hard e, is certainly at home here in S.C., Hay-suse is not. Yesterday at the Piggly Wiggly I asked the deli ladies where I could find tortillas. “You mean chips?” asked one of them. “No, tortillas, like for burritos and stuff.” The ladies furrowed their brows and shook their heads at each other, like I had asked for something as rare and unappetizing as cow spit.

We did eventually find a small Mexi-Asian section, the cuisines being very similar, you know, and against our better judgement bought a package of pillowy Old El Paso flour tortillas (the only option available), the kind that are so processed they never really expire, like Twinkies. So anathema to a girl born and raised in Southern California.

On the drive out (we generally fly into the in-laws’ home city then drive to the coast) we once again interacted with the lawmen of Springfield, about 100 miles from the coast, where I was pulled over for speeding last year. This time it was a routine driver’s license checkpoint, which nevertheless resulted in a fair amount of knee-slapping over the fact that we had come all this way to go to the beach. “You took yourselves a wrong turn somewhere!” said one of the officers.

My California license saved me a ticket last year. “California!” the officer who pulled me over exclaimed when I handed it over, then asked, “If I give you a ticket, will you promise to pay it?” That “if I give you a ticket” part made it seem optional to me, so I answered, “Well, officer, I would prefer not to get the ticket.” He slapped my registration and license against his wrist and, to my everlasting surprise, handed it back to me with an admonition to “Take it easy from here on out.” I thought I was all cute, having charmed my way out of a ticket, until my partner told me that the officer was weighing whether to arrest me to ensure payment.

So, no trouble with the law, and the swimsuit is performing like a champ: The mastectomy suit is the single greatest invention since seamless undiepants. Ooh, and we swam with dolphins yesterday! Or rather dolphins passed by roughly 25 feet from where we were swimming. And even I’m not too jaded to squeal with delight when dolphins leap through the ocean within my spitting distance–you know, if I were a whale, with a blow hole in my skull.

Three days passed. Four to go. Hope to check in again soon.

So, my partner and I are on vacation in the South. Actually, right now we’re staying with her parents in the little s south, where the legendary manners and cute accents are at the ready but there are still a few Democrats sprinkled about. Tomorrow morning we head for The South, where there’s at least an outside chance we’ll be burned in effigy. This could be my last blog entry, y’all.

We arrived early for the annual South Carolina family beach trip to attend a banquet last night honoring my partner’s mother, who was named her home state’s 2006 Woman of the Year, or “2006 WOY,” as said the placard at our table. Any outstanding fantasies I had about shuffling nonchalantly around the banquet hall, unnoticed by all but those bearing canapés, were dashed soon after we arrived. Upon our entrance the vigorous shaking of hands commenced, accompanied by enthusiastic affirmations about how very great her mother is and how very proud we all are and how very pleased we were to be there. And not just any hands. Gubernatorial candidates’ hands. State supreme court justices’ hands. Power hands!

It’s notable that measures have never been taken to obscure my relationship with the daughter of the 2006 WOY. I was seated front-and-center at the WOY family table, introduced to all comers as “my daughter’s partner, Teresa.”

Hell, most people didn’t even need an introduction: Dozens of strangers approached me, clasping my hand in their own as they gleefully declared, “You must be Teresa!” Not that playing “Find the Lesbian” was a tough call in last night’s environment, but the very fact that folks in her life know that there is a lesbian and that her name is Teresa indicates an openness I never expected.

Just goes to show you that expectations are only as valuable as the stereotypes that form them. Who would ever suspect it? The churchgoing Southern family with the perilously high community profile welcomes the unbaptized West Coast dyke into their inner sanctum, saying, “Hey, this is the person our daughter loves, everybody, and it’s really OK.”

Oh, sure, my mother-in-law would really, really like to baptize me, but that’s to be expected. Twelve years into our relationship, I think she understands that it probably won’t happen, and that we can even joke about the issue indicates that my stubborn aversion to salvation isn’t a deal-breaker.

So I’d like to take this moment to say that my partner was right when she suggested, in the face of my powerful impulse just weeks ago to shave my head, that maybe I could keep a thatch of hair until after the banquet. ‘Cause when I think sincerely about the strives her mother has made to wrap her head around me and fit me in to her family picture, private and public–not to even mention the vehicle and hotel room upgrades we scammed by casually mentioning our relationship to the WOY–not arriving bald to her crowning seems the very least I can do.

Forty-five people were expected at my parents’ ranchito Saturday for an extended family reunion, so naturally my mother had made enough scalloped potatoes for 100. Actual head count: 30. The low turnout was attributed to a variety of reasons, many of which impugned the character of those not in attendance, but I thought it perfectly acceptable to avoid the California high desert during fire season—with blazes actively flanking my parents’ property to the north and the south—on a day that promised, and delivered, a high of 106 degrees.

My aunt was pouring the leftover scalloped potatoes into a very large ceramic bowl that was long past heaping. She kept pausing to glower at the volume, willing the thick glop of creamy potatoes to somehow settle and make room for more.

“I could take some off your hands,” I suggested. I *heart* my mother’s scalloped potatoes, and she only makes them on special occasions, like, to celebrate fire season.

“Oh, good idea,” my mom said, then, assessing the overflow, exclaimed, “And I have just the container!” With that, she hurried out the door of the kitchen and crossed the yard to The Shed™. (No offense to certain readers of this blog who may have quite handsome sheds of their own, sheds that serve their sheddy utilities very well at that, but this is no ordinary shed. Were one to amuse The Shed™—an act I didn’t think possible until recently—it wouldn’t so much snicker as explode in paroxysms of mirth.) Mom returned with a plastic clamshell container, the kind one would get when ordering, say, a quart of macaroni salad at the grocery store deli counter. These are the sorts of things for which one apparently needs a gigantesque shed.

In light of our utterly bizarre weather of late—humidity in California?—no doubt signaling the death knell of a planet at last defeated by our timeless quest for convenience and transient gratification, my mother’s frugality has become something of an asset. Disposability is in the eye of the beholder, and neither squares of aluminum foil nor plastic forks are squandered at the ranchito until they’re utterly spent.

During my childhood my family’s thrift was a source of embarrassment. Also confusion, as demonstrated by the dreaded shell game “Which margarine container in the refrigerator actually contains margarine?” Ungrateful at the time for the ascetic ideals I would later value, I selfishly yearned for Tupperware.

Tupperware was rarely sold at yard sales, from whence came most of our household goods and clothing. When it did pop up, it was generally warped beyond use—or stinky. And even when perfectly good Tupperware appeared, my mother, for her own arcane reasons, refused to buy it. “You don’t know what people have been doing with that,” she said. I pushed for details, but she couldn’t come up with any specific scenarios to illustrate her fears. I knew from experience, though, that urine figured prominently in her distrust of strangers.

I grew up in a part of Orange County that was, during my youth, one part residential to three parts agricultural. And while we loved going to local fruit and vegetable stands for our produce, my mother admonished me never to eat so much as a strawberry until we got home, where it could be properly washed. I thought she was concerned about dirt, something I had eaten a fair amount of in my childhood, until she told me that the field workers relieved themselves on the fruit. And lest I think this was aberrant behavior, she also advised me never to send food back at restaurants. (Having worked for a number of years in a restaurant, I can say with some certainty that line cooks in general exercise no such urine vendetta against diners, even picky ones, but pissing off waiters is a total crapshoot.)

No one wants Tupperware that’s been used to collect or distribute urine—for which vessels suburban needs are myriad. And no one’s fool enough to pay retail for new pieces when our lives are so very rich with empty margarine tubs and plastic clamshell deli containers, especially when The Shed™ is there to store an airplane hangar’s worth of storage containers—and, good God, how we Americans love storage: One need only observe the checkout aisles at Target, with all those shoppers buying coffin-size plastic bins, to witness our zeal for stuff and the putting away of it.

Logic against such profligacy aside, I grew up with a platonic fetish for genuine Tupperware. (Rubbermaid knockoffs just aren’t the same.) But it took many years of adulthood and financial independence before I treated myself to a few pieces. Old notions die hard, and in my world Tupperware was for those with more disposable income—and far less monetary sense.

In short, I was a sitting duck when Phranc came to my workplace to host an afternoon party—working as I do to further the Gay Agenda™, my company’s HR goddess thought it the ideal office event—demonstrating the wondrous wares of Earl Tupper. The überbutch lesbian folksinger and latter-day Tupperware Lady has elevated the classic home sales party to the level of performance art—and she brings her guitar to strum out a ditty about the miraculous burping plastics.

Who could resist her androgynous wile? Besides, I gave Phranc absolutely no reason to pee on anything I purchased from her.

And so it is that I finally have Tupperware of my own. The phabulous Phranc sold me two CrystalWave™ soup mugs. The little red nubbins let steam escape when microwaving!

Two sandwich keepers, for the sound use of which I must caution you to buy squarish loaves of bread, not the pillow-size loaves that are increasingly the norm:

Your classic Wonderlier® bowl:

And a neat-o cake decorating set that Tupperware International seems to have discontinued, making it a comparative rarity that just makes it more special.

But we didn’t stop there, my partner and I. We’ve since acquired a round cake taker, which, alarmingly, we bought at a yard sale. (Only a barbarian would pee in a cake taker.)

A Jel-Ring® mold, allowing us to make fabulously retro desserts:

And a snack cup set, for your peanuts and cottage cheese and what have you. These little guys compete with the CrystalWave™ soup mugs for Most-Used Tupperware status:

I still covet a Spin ‘N Save™ salad spinner, one of the pricier items in the Tupperware catalog. It would be perfect for rinsing the urine from my farmers’ market greens, and if I had one, I would eat salad every single day for the rest of my life.

Can a shed really be so far behind?

We met a neighbor!

It was Wednesday night, “garb night”—which is short for “Ugh, we have to gather all our little trash receptacles and empty them into the big trash receptacles, then lug it all out to the curb for pickup tomorrow morning.” It’s really not such a trial, but we whine about it anyway because it robs us of valuable TV-viewing time, which is in short supply on Wednesday night, what with The Amazing Race, America’s Next Top Model, Top Chef, and Lost all vying for our attention. Before anyone starts tsking, I know that my television taste is pedestrian, but I learn things from reality television, valuable things. Just this week I learned, courtesy of Jade on America’s Next Top Model, that elephants are descended from dinosaurs. I also learned, courtesy of Top Chef, what the hell truffles are. Actually, Top Chef didn’t teach me anything, but because the delicacy was the subject of a culinary showdown I finally asked my partner, six short years after truffles first entered my consciousness at a friend’s cocktail party—what is that in the cheese?—where they come from. She was kind enough to look it up on something called the Internet and tell me that they’re “round, warty fungi” that grow underground adjacent to the roots of specific trees. Yum!

So we were wheeling our color-coded city trashcans out to the curb when a woman called out to me from across the street. I’m in the habit of pretending I don’t hear such things since in general nothing good comes of being yelled at by strangers, but she seemed in some distress, and we had only moments before ignored some loud violent noises, so I acknowledged her and she scurried over.

“Did you hear those noises?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “They were pretty loud.”

“Did it sound like gunfire to you?” she asked, petting her pregnant tummy.

“No,” my partner said. “Just some guy having a temper tantrum.”

“Yeah,” I said. “He was shouting and hitting something, but not someone. It sounded like he was whaling on his car…or maybe his girlfriend’s car.”

She introduced herself and told us she lived across the street and that she was home alone. And that she was pregnant, which we had gathered. We introduced ourselves and remarked that we liked her house, after which she told us how she and her husband came to choose red as its exterior color, then she made a joke about neighbors maybe thinking she was either running an elementary school or a whorehouse.

“I work from home,” she said. “I saw the boys who tagged your fence and I ran after them, but then I thought, I’m pregnant. I shouldn’t be doing this.”

“Oh, thanks,” my partner said. “The fence gets tagged a lot. But the city paints it, so don’t worry too much about it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Don’t put yourself at risk on our fence’s account.”

“I know,” she said. “But it just makes me so mad.”

I wanted to tell her to attack with vigor if someone tagged our garage door again, to weaponize her pregnant belly if need be, but instead I said, “It’s nice to know you’re home and looking out for us. Feel free to knock on our door whenever you need some company.”

Just like that, after over three years in our house, we made a neighbor friend. Over the tops of our trashcans, no less. I’m glad we didn’t have stinky trash, like the time we threw away a dead possum that had been left—in a box, with a dirty diaper—in our front yard. (The dirty diaper wasn’t on the dead possum, which would have been extra extraordinary.) In the absence of stinky trash, and presumably anything else that would have struck her as offensive—suggesting that lesbians in their pseudo-jammies are inoffensive enough—she offered that she and her husband should have us over, and we countered that we should have them over, and while nothing was hammered out on the spot, I think we all meant it.

To be fair, we have met a couple of other neighbors. We’re not shut-ins, for chrissake. There was a woman who introduced herself as Linda Rose, and reintroduced herself to me every time she saw me as if we had never met, who dropped by shortly after we moved in to tell us she was the neighborhood watch captain and that her husband was an electrician should we ever need work of that nature—like, for instance, if we wanted to install lights in our front yard so that more people like herself might drop by. At one point she noticed some trash in our yard and mused that in Mexico there are no trashcans, the implication being, if I understand her correctly, that recent immigrants are to blame for any instances of littering. (Or maybe it was simply an unfortunately timed non sequitur.) Then she regaled us with the news that our overachieving oleander around the side of the house is a favored tryst site for gay hustlers turning tricks. If Linda Rose was right, the boys are either not playing safe or they’re the tidiest hustlers ever: While the oleander sees its fair share of garbage, I’ve never seen a shred of telltale condom detritus lying about.

Linda Rose moved about a year ago, presumably to a neighborhood populated entirely by people who grew up knowing what trashcans are and how to use them.

There’s also this Swedish woman. While we haven’t properly met, she certainly knows who I am. She thinks I’m gunning for her and her dog. I was backing out of the garage one morning when she strode across our driveway like she owned it. (That’s something we’ve had to accept in our hearts, that since we live on a corner lot, lazy Americans—including immigrants from lands with and without trashcans—will cut across our property to save the three extra steps it would take to navigate its perimeter.) I hit my brakes as she scooped up her little yippy dog, glaring at me and muttering something in her native tongue. Another time I backed out and stopped in the driveway to mess with a CD or something. Then, admittedly without looking, I hit the remote to close the garage door. I glanced up just in time to see her rear away from the garage. She had been rounding the corner via the sex oleander and apparently felt in danger of being crushed by the descending door. I rolled down my window to say I was sorry, that I hadn’t seen her, to which she replied, “Every time!” OK, (a) twice does not qualify as “every time,” (b) when a car is idling in a driveway, the closing of a garage door is imminent, and (c) if you’re cutting across my property such that you’re walking within crushing distance of my garage door, you’re so on my property in such an uninvited and annoying way.

There’s also a high school kid and her mom who walk a little white dog so often that my partner and I suspect the dog has psychic power over them. The girl is really nice and always says hello. Her mom doesn’t speak English but often smiles at us. Meanwhile the dog looks at us in a knowing way, warning us with his eyes not to meddle in his business lest he teach our dog his supersecret mind-control tricks.

Those being the neighbors we know, you can understand our delight at meeting a friendly woman who paints her house red and chases taggers—while pregnant! And she owns this amazing company that sells hand-stitched greeting cards made by women in her native Armenia.

Pretty cool, huh? Makes me want to have a great big gay wedding so that I can order up a custom batch. And register for gifts.

In the meantime, it’s just nice to know there’s someone we can wave to when we catch each other outside, maybe even trot across the street to visit with. We could borrow a cup of sugar from her should the need arise, watch each other’s houses for suspicious activity, or just chitchat over the garbage. Do they have trashcans in Armenia?