Conflicted
Friday, August 02, 2002
By losangelesadmirer@<redacted>.com
Conflicted? You're Not Alone!
By "losangelesadmirer"
Over the past ten years, I have had many conversations, in motel rooms, bars, and chatrooms, with TV's, TS's, and my fellow admirers, about the phenomenon most often referred to as the "I'm not gay!" syndrome. The follow-up, of course is: "But I sure do like those drag queens and trannies!" Someone I met in Vegas a couple months ago, after chatting with her online, looked at me and said that she thought that I was going to be a pretty happy person in the not too distant future.
Certainly, I am a much happier person than I was a decade ago. Back then, most of my encounters with TG hotties were hurried and desperate, taking place in alleys and cars with street-walking professionals, who ranged from the sublime and friendly to the terrifyingly demented. The criminalization of sex work is a remnant of the dark ages, a direct descendant of the Salem witch trials, and manages to achieve the vengeance of every overweight fundamentalist housewife who hates the fact that a beautiful tranny in London can charge $600 an hour. I have a tranny friend here in Los Angeles who was approached by an older businessman in a bar. He stuffed twelve single hundred dollar bills down her clothes, one after the other, and then, when they went to a hotel room, just wanted to worship her equipment.
Ah, yes, the tool below. That which forms the tantalyzingly forbidden image, combined with the breasts above. The legendary shemales of our time, stars of the Internet, high-priced escorts, sometimes crazed on drugs, or maybe it's just the hormones. We admirers all have our discreetly titled files of the countless downloaded pics, we look at the online video excerpts, we rent or buy the tapes and DVD's and magazines, we give the girls the hundreds of dollars they ask for a date, after we buy them drinks at the bars. Are we in denial? Are we closet cases?
Sometimes we can't get it up. Sometimes they can't. Once I was with someone in the Bay Area and when we were done, she said, "You seem like you are upset about something." I was, something very personal, unrelated to my sex life, and she urged me to talk about it. We sat there for an hour after my paid time had run out, and I went home that night deeply touched, and having worked out a lot about what had been bothering me. No religion, no degree, just a caring person.
Here's what I don't understand. My closest friends know that I am a trannychaser, and do not condemn me for it. Neither does a friend whom I have known since I was in college, who is the epitome of hardcore screaming stereotypical gay-ness, someone who would never in a million years fantasize about getting laid by a gorgeous shemale. He has been with countless flannel-shirt cop-mustache clones, the All-American Tom Selleck type really gets him going. That whole scene does nothing for me - my fantasy is totally a woman, except for that one "swinging" feature. The average gay bar holds no attraction for me. And, the average gay bar, full of bears, yuppies, or straight-actors, is not always welcoming to TV/TS visitors.
That is one of the strangest aspects of this whole mess. Here is a group of people who have been discriminated against down through history, but now they discriminate against another minority. I have talked to a bartender at a tranny bar about this, who told me how flabbergasted she was when she first learned about that reality.
A queen on the streets of most cities risks being gay-bashed every night of her life. That takes guts! I respect their courage. I myself have colleagues who would feel very uneasy with me if they knew for a fact that I am a trannychaser. They already sense that I am slightly left of center, but still like me nonetheless, as long as it is only a vague feeling. But I could not walk a tranny escort into a hotel where they might see her, unless I was prepared to trigger the beginning of the end of my working relationship with these guys. Eventually, I would be ostracized.
A few years ago, you may have heard about a soldier in the Army, who dated a TG performer in Nashville, and was beaten to death with a baseball bat while he was asleep in his bunk. There were bizarre complications to the story, I think the murderer had actually worn panties under his clothing since he was a teenager, and another guy who egged him on to commit the murder had been, of all people, the one to first take the victim to the bar where he met his future girlfiend. And had been making out with another tranny dancer! I have some theories about all this. I believe that my co-workers would love to get a blowjob from a gorgeous TG porn star, same as me, but they cannot mentally allow themselves to admit that. It would violate all that they believe in about who they are, and who their wives and girlfriends and parents need to believe they are. If they could get that blowjob in a dark room, without anyone ever knowing about it, I believe they would.
A friend of mine once asked me to take him to the original Power Exchange Substation in San Francisco, and I did, with some misgivings about the possibility of it shorting out some electrodes in his suburbanite brain. Unfortunately, it did have that effect, and on the way home he despairingly asked me, "Does this mean I'm a fag, that I'm attracted to these
Transsexuals?”
I tried to answer him carefully and honestly. "What it means, I think, is that our mothers brought us up to associate femininity with things like perfume, lingerie, big tits and elaborate hairstyles. That is not truly what actual biological womanhood is about. If you hang out around some dykes who live out in the country, you see that they let their armpit hair grow, they are muscular and not self-conscious about it, they are relaxed having short hair, instead of being lipstick lesbians, and often they are really good parents to their children. But they don't look like our suburbanite mothers, or the movie stars that we were conditioned to worship."
He wasn't convinced. He hated himself for what he felt, and I know quite well what that's like. I went on to meet someone here in Los Angeles that writes for a TG mag, and is actually a therapist in real life. We never really dated, but have had some great talks. Talking to her, I decided that I loved real women and TS/TV's, both, and that my mind was big enough to
encompass all that.
However, all the genetic women of the world do not happen to live inside my mind! When I was a college kid in the Seventies, it was quite fashionable to experiment with bisexuality. Piles of people got high, and wound up in bed with each other, all the time. Then came AIDS. Suddenly, most women I met did not want to even hear a hint of any possibility that one's weinerschnitzel ever encountered another person's johnson. Straight was back, with a vengeance.
Aggressive crew cuts instead of rock shags. Working out at the gym instead of hiking through Third World countries. Pro-business, instead of countercultural. Wall Steet, baby! Booze, not pot. Coke and speed, not mushrooms. Ecstasy and the hypnotic strains of techno, rather than a plaintive folksinger's voice asking society to change. Younger women told me how they wanted their men to be type A and dominate them, just a little. The gentle boy of the past was left out in the cold.
The good news is that a traveller can still walk into a tranny bar pretty much anywhere on earth, and even if you are not cruising for sex, even if you are not a buffed out movie star, you can sit down and have a drink, watch the show and talk to people, and leave feeling pretty good. Because trannnies and their bartenders don't want any bullshit. And if you walk in and show that you have none, the welcome mat rolls right out.
But one of the dangerous things about having a hot time with the first tranny street hooker that you ever meet is that then you know it is possible. And despite other downers later in life, you keep looking to duplicate that first explosive experience. I have never been able to take straight guys seriously who go to titty bars and spend hundreds of dollars and never get their dick sucked at the end of it! I am used to Amsterdam, where a blowjob is still about fifty bucks, and a hundred gets you pretty much anything.
In many ways, though, I am a big talker, and still spend more time than I would like to admit in a conflicted state of mind. I asked Jon if I could write this, since a couple times in the last year I have left a tryst feeling sad and hopeless. Feeling like I have closed the book on being with genetic girls, and now I am left in a no-man's land, older and just tired instead of wiser, all without ever having found the TG girlfriend of my dreams. Just going through sex acts compulsively, with no joy.
On another recent occasion, I went to a motel room with five other guys, three tgirls and a video camera! A good time was had by all, and I drove home feeling fine. Quixotically, sometimes I am a person who is quite happy with the choices he's made in the years since that first streetwalker in a tight dress and high heels got down on her knees in that parking lot in San Francisco, after looking me in the eye, smiling, and gently grinding against me while we first felt each other up, taking the time to make it fun for me, instead of just a bored transaction.
In the bars I see them all, the guys completely filled with shame, hanging back in the corners, freaking out the girls by staring at them hopelessly, and then, at the opposite end of the spectrum, the ones who are confident. Laughing, dancing, buying drinks, and finally leaving with a spectacular creature. I've been both those guys, when I was in different moods (and had different amounts of money in my pocket.)
Let's keep on celebrating those freedoms that we are allowed. And then say a prayer for all the tgirls in conservative small towns all over the world, where they cannot safely go out in public, much less party the way that we can in most of our bigger cities. And, finally, light a candle for all the tormented admirers, with their overheated minds and a rocket in their pocket with a mind of its own.