Lay All Your Love On Me

I realize that what I'm about to tell you all will probably land me in trouble with gays, straights, and bisexuals. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance for Anti-Defamation will send an ambassador to slap me across the face with a glove and challenge me to a duel. If I lose the duel, I will be thrown into GLAAD prison with Charlie Daniels and forced to attend sensitivity training.

I'm not trying to offend anybody, though. I am what I am.

I'm the kind of girl who falls in love with a transvestite.

Okay, he wasn't really a transvestite, and we weren't really in love. Indeed, I doubt whether he even knew my name.

He was a tiny slip of a waiter with a tired, delicate face and pretty red hair. He came to our neighborhood gay bar dressed in drag at least once. I admired him from afar. What really caught my roving eye was the fact that he was not in drag-queen drag, with pancake makeup and a wig. He was dressed like I used to dress, when I was a bouncy teenager--sparkly hair clips, a cute skirt, and a little makeup. He looked as attractive dressed as a lady as he did dressed as a man, and in either case, I wanted to leap across the room, knock him to the floor, and kiss him for days.

I've met lots of men and women who attract me. I choose to pursue relationships with men exclusively. When I've dated women, I've experienced this nagging feeling that I am not quite being myself. Finally, after years of tears, I have decided that I'd better admire women from afar, like I did with that waiter in drag.

I know this cuts my chances for love in half. My mother has already pointed this out to me. She would be happy if I married a caveman, as long as the caveman was willing to take care of me. Or a cavewoman, as the case may be.

Rigid adherence to heterosexuality is my own personal dating quirk--not a moral judgment about being gay. Love is hard to come by, and I refuse to condemn it, unless it involves stealing another person's love.

I'm not saying that it is okay for people to get it on with pigs, or underaged boys, because that isn't love. What I am saying is that as long as the gay dude down the street isn't shacked up with my boyfriend, he's not a threat to me, no matter what the President says.

That said, love is not easy for me to sort out. Neither are the various weird mental and bodily sensations that are commonly associated with love. There are certain types of persons who seem to possess a particular hold over me. This has little to do with their physical appearance and a lot to do with the fact that I am weird. I am not a very sexual person, but I am a very emotional person, with the result that I have crushes on lots of people with whom I do not necessarily wish to play house.

As long as we're cleaning house, I'd also like to discuss the ever-sensitive F*g Hag issue. When I was in college, gay dudes clustered to me like moths around a flame, as the old song goes. I'm not one of these ladies who thinks she can "turn" gay men. I can barely get straight men to remember that they're interested in women, much less convince gay fellas to change their natures on my account.

I'm talking about devotion.

I have little doubt that I would defy the Pope and the U.S. Constitution to be in my friend Jack's big gay society wedding. I'd even hide my tattoo, if his in-laws wanted to keep things respectable.

Especially if I got to be the flower girl.

I will admit that I'm beginning to think my chances of finding a Johnny for my June are slim. I'm a vegetarian, a bleeding-heart liberal, and a cafeteria Catholic. I do daily battle with a full-fledged case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. If you don't think that those things will hinder my chances of finding love, let me tell you that I also wear paisleyed skirts with handkerchief hems, keep cats--preferably at least four at a time--and have about a dozen stuffed animals sitting in my living room.

Pretty much the only guys who would go out with me are characters in "Doonesbury."

If this essay ever finds its way into print, my chances for domestic bliss will be even slimmer, I think, because it will become apparent to the entire free world that I am a complete whack-job--but that's okay. I am what I am. And I'm okay with that. I just wish someone would loan me their babies once in a while....