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The winter morning Blanca deposited
me
at my home in the 'burbs, we gave each other
a friends' hungover goodbye kiss on the lips.
From her bedroom window above,
my mother spotted Blanc: stocky, wearing a vest,
tie, fuzz for hair. At the door she interrogated me:
"Was that a woman or a man?"
With one gesture I'd become a fully-fleshed queer.
I leaned on the doorjamb, half cocky,
unresponsive, wondering if she'd run
me out of her house. That morning she'd attended
services at the Presbyterian church,
where the minister spoke some Sundays about the evils
of homosexuality. Although she never
eavesdropped, she couldn't help
but overhear me camping and bitching
on the telephone that fall
about drag queens and lesbian dance clubs,
so she wasn't actually surprised
I'd been to the annual Gay Community Picnic.
Did she give up on me then? Or the night I invited
friends from the Rocky Horror Picture Show,
the teenagers she'd attempted to ban
from our house, vain blond boys in tight silver-lamé briefs,
drinking beer and shaking their shiny fannies
in her clean harvest-gold living room,
girls in top hats, tails and sequinned bow ties,
screeching along with that soundtrack record she despised.
(Years later she said, "I thought you'd go to that movie
till you were thirty-six." I shot back
that I'd viewed it only sixty-nine times,
never said I quit when I found private rituals to toast
with my first lover.) Did she call up her therapist
or her God when she found my girlfriend and I
slept in one bunk, not two?
Or when I became positive the
solution
to every problem lay in the immediate overthrow
of the heteropatriarchy, if not the conversion
of every woman to feminist activist--preferably a lesbian.
I missed no chance to preach my new gospel, force her
to accept my Fridays at the bar,
necking with girls in cars' back seats,
but she skirted my flirtations till the day
my idyllic wimmin's world fell
in: I got dumped. Women, too, betrayed
and left. Mom had remained tight-lipped
through this affair, but now it was my turn
for shock: one evening when she passed my room,
she couldn't bear to hear me sobbing
at my desk as I wrote. She stood behind me,
touched my shoulder.
I could not stop, speak, turn.
I felt older
than I ever had, and uglier. "I hate to see you so upset.
Can I do anything for you?" I swallowed tears,
looked at her for the first time in months.
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