Last night I had occasion to send "Enough Rope" to a gay couple from my OLGC rosary group. Rereading the essay, thinking about it and my other, somewhat less serious gender essay "Cocksucker Suit" (published in Greg Herren & Paul Willis' anthology Love, Bourbon Street), I came to a realization that I hadn't ever really admitted to myself before:

I like wearing dresses.

Mentally and emotionally I identify as male and always will, but the older I get, the more fluid my feelings on gender seem to become. It makes me happy that terms like "genderqueer" are used in casual online conversation. It makes me realize that when I put on a nice dress and shoes, fix my sacrum-length hair, and generally get all done up, it doesn't make me feel female; it just makes me feel sharp, the same way I feel when I wear my cockseersucker suit and Stacy Adams boys' alligator loafers. I don't wear much makeup, but I do like me some jewelry. Most of the time my style of dress resembles supergee's timeless description of his own fashion sense -- "garish and slovenly" -- but when I want to look nice, I don't care what gender my clothes are. I did for a while in 2004 and 2005, going through a phase where I wasn't at all comfortable wearing women's clothes or jewelry, but then in '05 there was this certain little event, and after that I found that I had bigger things to worry about than whether wearing a dress made me less manly. And everybody knows that most men in New Orleans, gay or straight, have at least one dress in their closet anyway.

Earlier this week we were delayed at the vet's office while taking Frankie and Junior in for their annual checkups, and thus I found myself thumbing through a copy of People magazine. The cover story was about how actress Kirstie Alley had gained 83 pounds. Inside, I saw photos of a beautiful, healthy-looking fat woman and read an interview about how "ashamed" she was to be so "ugly" and "disgusting" because she had "slipped" and eaten the foods she loved. She didn't binge on gallons of Haagen Dazs and pounds of Oreos; she just ate things other than Jenny Craig and didn't starve herself. She mentioned having enjoyed Chinese food as she might speak of consuming aborted fetuses. I lost track of the number of times both she and the interviewer used words like hideous, hate, disgusting, lazy, shame.

And shame seemed to be at the core of it. The article read as a public shaming whose victim took enthusiastic part in it, Kirstie Alley's apology to America for being fat. Her confession, even; People was her confessional and its millions of readers her priests, deciding whether to absolve her or not (and never mind how many of them are also fat; she's famous, so it is a much graver sin for her).

I think this is fucked. People are not all designed to be the same size. People in real life are not attracted exclusively to thin lovers. A woman gaining weight should not be so newsworthy that it is featured on a magazine cover.

I am not fat, but I've been called fat (online, natch, not in person) simply because that's one of the ways you insult someone you perceive to be female. In 2007-2008 I lost my appetite and became quite thin, and I know how free people felt to comment on that (half thought I had cancer; the other half told me how great I was looking). I can only imagine how much freer they feel to comment on something that's more widely perceived as unhealthy, unattractive, and "bad." Chris is fat, but he never gets abused for it because New Orleans is a pretty fat-tolerant city (though I'm still amused by the dining-board poster who pointed out that he probably would have been shunned at the Delachaise if he hadn't been the chef there). I gather, though, from things I read and reports from fat friends in other places, that many fat people take an incredible amount of public shit, and all I can say is, you aren't helping, Ms. Kirstie Alley.

Since someone asked about the picture yesterday: yes, that is all my natural color. I put some red streaks in it in the spring of '06, but they've long since faded out. I refuse to dye it any more because there is some gray coming in, and I feel that I've earned every one of those silvery strands and want to show them off. Besides, I'm too lazy to bother with all that mess these days.

As long as I'm on this fascinating subject, I may as well mention that I am growing my bangs out. Those of you who have done this will feel my barrette-, clip-, and gel-laden pain.

I took this picture to post to longhair (which I joined when I realized my hair was actually long enough to wear in styles, not just in a ponytail, braided, or clipped) and will probably do so eventually, but for now, I thought people here might like to see how long it has gotten.



It hasn't been anywhere close to this length since I was, like, 8. For reasons I'm not entirely clear on, I haven't cut it (except for trims) since the post-Katrina failure of the federal levee system, and I have no plans to do so, since it has begun to take on that weird pet-like quality that long hair sometimes gets (especially when you don't process it or use heat on it, so that it actually feels nice -- a novelty for me after all those years of bleached, Manic Panic-ed hair!).

After taking this picture, I realized it was a little longer on the right side than the left. I think I have remedied this with my clever scissors, but it could require professional intervention.