The Queer and the Restless

by Kris Ripper

  I flushed hotter. I couldn’t help it.

  Alisha laughed and returned to my arms, running her hands down my sides. “I like the way you look at me. Makes me feel beautiful.”

  “You are. You are beautiful.” I kissed her, because she was pressed against me and it seemed like the thing to do.

  “This is why I came out here tonight,” she murmured.

  “You came out here to kiss me?”

  “To be kissed by you. There’s a difference.”

  Her hands guided me loosely until both of us were moving together. I touched her hair, her shoulders, her arms, sheathed in sheer black sleeves that were loose at her wrists.

  It was still fun, with a thin vein of something serious running through it. We danced, laughing at each other, kissing a little more, but never too much. Her hands on my body didn’t make me feel exposed. I may have made her feel beautiful, but she made me feel something else, something precious. Dancing with Alisha made me feel handsome, like a boy out with a beautiful girl.

  My chest went tight, so I forced myself to stop thinking and just enjoy this moment, this dance.

  I wanted it to go on forever, but eventually, sweaty and disheveled, we kissed again and she leaned in.

  “I have to go. I hate my job, but I kind of have to be at it in like six hours.”

  “Sorry.” I wasn’t sure if I was apologizing for her job, or how late it was, or what.

  “Are you kidding? This is the best night I’ve had in months! I knew coming here was a good idea.” She grinned. “See you around, Ed. Are you coming to F*ck G*nd*r next week?”

  “Definitely. Are you?”

  “For sure. This is my favorite so far, I think. Mostly because Fredi used those little asterisks in it.”

  Of course that would be her favorite part. The asterisks. “I’ll be interested to see how everyone fucks gender. You should go home and get some sleep, Alisha. I’ll see you next week.”

  “You better believe it. Good night, handsome.” She kissed me on the cheek and turned, melting into the crowd while I stood there, staring after her, thinking about the word “handsome” and how fucking powerful it was. It was my goal, my desire, an almost tangible mountain I’d set myself to climb.

  Five foot seven inches tall, hair long enough on top to gel, seriously restrictive binders to hold my D-cup breasts in so they didn’t screw up all of my shirts. When I looked in the mirror I saw all the ways I’d never measure up. My facial hair was still practically nonexistent, even after a year on testosterone. I’d never be taller. I was lifting weights a little, but I was far from strong, and nowhere near buff.

  I had no idea what Alisha saw when she looked at me. Except that tonight she’d seen someone who was handsome.

  I hung out for a while longer, opting for a soda instead of another beer, which the bartender, Tom, comped me. Sometimes I could find Cameron at Club Fred’s reading a book, but not tonight. I laughed and talked and drank my soda, all of it with this thin sheen of detachment, trying to understand how people saw me, how they saw each other, how much of it was performance. Some people, like Fredi, Club Fred’s ferocious owner, seemed to be entirely honest, as if she’d be as gruff and loud in her own home as she was at the bar. Some people, like Zane, definitely had a “public” persona.

  If Steven Costello were here, what would I see? A secretive, overwhelmed straight boy? A depressed twenty-one-year-old hiding in drugs? Something else?

  I finally went home, grateful for the quiet, grateful that no one in my house was having a party. Most of them were probably still out, though the kettle was warm when I heated it for tea, so clearly someone was up. I made my tea in peace and took it back to my room.

  Alisha. Dimples. Her hands, unhesitating on my sides.

  I drank my tea, took a shower, and crawled into bed. Where I may or may not have jerked off to the memory of Alisha’s hands and her eyes never leaving mine.

  I live in one of the older detached houses downtown, three levels, with a little wrought iron fence out front. I’m the only one with a bedroom on the first floor, which is convenient sometimes, less so when my roommates are having parties. To be fair, they’re all guys, and they’re mostly grad students in their late twenties, and they’ve been pretty cool to me, even if the notion of having a full-time job is a little foreign to them.

  I had a full-time job in undergrad. But I think they all come from enough money to not worry about their bills, so I guess they probably didn’t work in undergrad. Or didn’t work much. Or I might be assuming that they’re all entitled white boys when maybe they aren’t.

  There’re four of them. The guy in the attic is José, who definitely isn’t white, and might not be all that entitled. I’ve only seen him like four times in the last six months. He has a girlfriend who lives somewhere else. Troy and JP are two tall, blond, white hipsters who look so similar it took me a long time to tell them apart. JP wears bowler hats a lot. The fourth guy is David, who’s kind of a hipster, but the decaf version. Despite the fact that he spends the most time in the kitchen, I don’t know him that well. I think he hangs out with Troy and JP, though it’s a little hard to say, what with the avoiding and all. He cooks a lot of Indian food, but I don’t think he’s Indian.

  Saturday morning was blissfully quiet in the house, so I made a tofu scramble and ate it standing over the stove after propping my generic e-reader against the salt, with the pepper making sure it didn’t slide away.

  I’m not a fan of tofu. Reading makes it less likely I’ll taste it. I keep meaning to go to the new vegan restaurant in town to see if maybe they can make tofu interesting, but it’s expensive, and for some reason my brain has it classified as more of a date-night thing than a “get lunch before heading back to the office to write more feel-good drivel” thing.

  I was just cleaning up when David came downstairs and zombie-ambled his way to the coffeepot.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.”

  Tofu was easier to clean off pans, but I still had to scrub it for a minute, which was apparently long enough for David to find his words.

  “Uh, hey, can I—can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.” I looked over. He was standing at the coffeepot like it was an altar and he was preparing for worship.

  “Uh, so, are you gay? Like, not that it matters, just, we were thinking, you never bring guys back here, and if you want to, you could. Unless that’s offensive or something. I mean, it wouldn’t be a problem. For us. If you were worried about that. Unless you aren’t gay. Uh.”

  Quite a speech to deliver to the coffee machine.

  I almost said, Yeah, I’m gay, before I remembered that if I said that, it’d give him entirely the wrong impression of the guests I’d be bringing home. If I ever brought guests home. I definitely couldn’t say, I’m straight. That felt crazy-wrong.

  “I date women.” There. That sounded right.

  David looked over, eyes wide. “Seriously? Uh, I mean, cool. But like . . . really? Like all the time? Shit, never mind, forget I said that. Not that—not that I thought a lot about it. We just kind of figured, uh . . .”

  At least this answered the question about whether or not I passed. I apparently passed as a gay guy.

  “But thanks.” I finished my cleaning as fast as I could. “That’s good to know. I don’t currently have a girlfriend.”

  “Hey, me neither. Though really—” He waved a hand at the house. “This isn’t usually the place they want to be, when I do. You know girls. They have all these expectations, like toilet paper. And clean dishes.”

  I set the pan aside to dry. “I’m pretty good on both those fronts, so maybe I’ll have more luck. See you later, David.”

  “Yeah, see you.”

  I made it all the way into my bed before I started laughing, muffling it with my pillow. My roommates had been stressing over possibly making me feel too uncomfortable to bring a date home. I was such a jerk. Even if they were entitled white boys (except for J
osé), they were apparently socially aware enough to try really hard not to be homophobic dicks. It was almost sweet.

  And, god, was I really straight now? I’d never felt any romantic attraction to men. But that couldn’t possibly make me straight. I didn’t feel straight.

  I muffled another bout of slightly hysterical laughter.

  I could pass as a man, just not a straight man. I decided I was definitely okay with that.

  Time to fire up my computer and get some work done.

  I hit Togg’s site first.

  Togg was a mystery. His site was called thetruthisinvisible.com, and his About page only said, “The Original Gay Guy reports the truth you won’t find in your mainstream publications.” Which could be the description of any site from Daily Kos to one of those Fox News fan sites that regurgitates whatever Bret Baier says.

  Except.

  Togg was good. Really good. He was faster than the Times-Record at getting news up. When a drag king was murdered back in March, Togg had been the only person who reported it until the paper came out the following Thursday; it hadn’t been considered big enough news to make the website, despite the fact that we frequently published irrelevant junk about bingo. No one had any idea who Togg really was, if he was one person or a collective of people. He was clearly local; only someone who knew La Vista well could talk about it with such a mix of contempt and disappointment. And I was relatively sure he was within five years of my age on either side. He referenced things that he would have only been likely to pay attention to if he’d been a teenager during a certain time period.

  I’d read his entire archives. Twice.

  I wasn’t really closer to figuring out who he was than when I first started reading him. People at the newspaper treated him like a joke, but the only thing that kept me from thinking that he might be one of them was that none of them were gay and out. It was hard to imagine someone calling himself “the original gay guy” being in the closet and having a boring day job where he pretended to be straight. Then again, maybe that would actually explain why he seemed to put so much time and energy into the website. Maybe it was projection or something.

  But I didn’t think he had a day job with set hours. The speed at which he reported things, no matter when they happened, made me think he definitely had a lot of flexibility where his time was concerned. And I hadn’t ruled out the idea that he might have a mole on the paper, in the police station, or both. On two separate cases that I’d heard of, Togg’s post hit his site while our editors were still scrambling to assign the story.

  I was pretty sure someone at the Times-Record was paying attention to him. Maybe my potential mole. Maybe someone else, who derided Togg even though they quietly recognized that he was doing a lot more serious work than we were, most of the time.

  The posts were a mix of classic news-type reporting and more ornate editorials, as if he was his own entire news team. I was jealous of the way he wrote his editorials, never going too far into the kind of manic prose it’s easy to tune out, always coming back around to his points until he’d built his entire argument cleanly. His style was way too consistent for him to really be more than one person, though the amount of work he put up daily was sometimes considered proof that he must be at least two or three people.

  I scanned back through the archives to read more about the drag king, Mistah Olmes, who’d been found in an alley in the Harbor District on a Saturday morning, head bashed in, face disfigured. Togg had stayed on the story for a solid week, posting updates. He’d talked to the cops, but he was cagey about which ones, and when, and how. (He had a mole. I could feel it.) Then I went further back.

  La Vista’s pretty small, one of the mini cities that makes up the East Bay. We have our share of gangs and drugs and violence—lower than some places, higher than others. We have our share of hate crimes, and sexual assaults, and carjackings. A few years ago there was a nasty string of home invasions that eventually led back to a group of high school kids who “didn’t mean to scare people” as they waved incredibly realistic guns around and duct-taped men and women and children so they couldn’t scream.

  Togg did a weekly round-up of local crime, but he saved his actual reports for things that had to do with queer people. I read back about a year without knowing what I was looking for. Then another year. By the time I’d gone almost all the way back to 2012, I was finished. After an article about a brutal gay bashing that left a boy in a coma, I shut down all my tabs.

  I kept looking at Steven Costello’s picture and trying to place him. Hard to do with a generic ID photo. Obviously wherever I’d seen him, he hadn’t had a monotone background and a bland smile on his face. Still. He looked so familiar. I tried to find him on social media, but he didn’t seem to have any accounts, at least not under his real name. I found a few other local Costello families, but the only ones who had kids in range to be siblings were black, and I doubted that matched this Steven Costello (and Joe’s description of his parents). Joe hadn’t mentioned siblings, anyway, but it would have accounted for how familiar/not familiar he looked.

  I couldn’t make Costello into a real story, but after I’d taken a break for trail mix, I decided that wasn’t actually my issue.

  I wanted more. More than blind cats. I’d only been at the paper for a year and a half, but I’d interned there when I was at the community college. That had to mean something. Maybe. And it didn’t hurt to at least try to get a better position. Or expand my current one.

  For the next two hours I crafted, revised, deleted, and rewrote an email to Potter. The first version was a full-on persuasive essay, high school style, with five perfect paragraphs citing my past credits, how I’d helped out senior reporters, and my value to the paper. The final version was one main paragraph and a sentence thanking him for his time. I kept it short. I just want my work to mean something. The most he could do was laugh at me, right?

  Then, stupidly, I hit Send. It took about five minutes for the regret to hit, and another hour before I was actively brainstorming ideas on how I could break into the office and delete the email before he saw it, except most of the editors had their email shoot straight to their phones.

  He might have already seen it. If so, he hadn’t—I hit Refresh again—replied.

  I paced my room, coming up with elaborate excuses about why I’d been so foolhardy as to write that email, and a long apology that was embarrassingly abject, which I’d never actually say to anyone.

  I made myself stop and steal half a cup of David’s coffee, which now needed to be reheated. There was no microwave in the house, so I stood there swirling a tiny amount of coffee in a sauce pot over low heat, bemoaning my stupidity.

  Research fatigue. That was what it was. Too many hours lost in research could make a man do strange things, and that was clearly what had happened here. There was no other explanation. I’d let myself get all wrapped up in this crazy conspiracy where there probably wasn’t one, and it’d taken over my brain.

  I dumped the coffee in a mug and took a walk. And prayed that Potter didn’t fire me.

  After a Sunday spent under a self-enforced internet ban, I was eager to get in to work on Monday morning, timing it so I managed to be at my desk and working before Potter arrived. My nerves were tightly strung, but he hadn’t replied to my crazy email, and a quick check of the Times-Record site and Togg didn’t reveal anything all that interesting having occurred during my self-restriction.

  Togg had an interview up with a couple of guys who were starting a drop-in center for queer kids down at the Harbor District. I took a few notes on their names and checked out their website. I might pitch that as an article. Sometimes we ran token articles like that, and if I had to write feel-good junk, I might as well find some that actually made me feel good.

  My pacing and internal rants came to nothing; aside from the usual good-morning grunt (about which Caspar assured me he didn’t give a fuck), Potter didn’t say a damn thing to me all day. I got the usual emailed assi
gnments, but that was it.

  The week passed mostly the same. I got permission to write fifteen inches about the drop-in center and set up an interview for next week. I stayed on task and generated easy posts for the website, took my turn coughing up links for Star to put out on Twitter and Facebook, and sent in all of my articles on time. Another boring week in the life, which I told myself to stop complaining about since I had the job I’d always wanted, lived in a house where people were generally cool to each other, and made slightly more than enough money to live. Things were good.

  I made myself stop thinking about Steven Costello and put the article back on the bulletin board in the break room.

  Abuela had gone out of town with her ladies, so I didn’t have any reason to stop by the house, which was kind of a relief. I kept thinking that I had no excuse to feel so restless when in fact I had a pretty good life, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was missing things—maybe big things, or small things, but something, I was missing something, and it ate at me a little every day.

  By the time Friday rolled around, I was so ready to F*ck G*nd*r it wasn’t even funny.

  If your entire life is gender-fucked, coming up with an appropriate outfit to fuck gender is a challenge. I could have gone in a suit or a dress and been pretty much fucking gender either way, but I opted for a white button-down, a bow tie, and a long flowing skirt I’d never gotten rid of.

  It felt weird to wear a skirt.

  I’d been raised on skirts and dresses, and had balanced the scales by wearing jeans underneath them. When I was old enough to have a job and shop for clothes with my own money, I’d bought men’s T-shirts and jackets, trying to cover up any hint that I didn’t have a man’s body. I’d stopped wearing skirts completely, for years, but when I checked myself in the bathroom mirror, I didn’t look like my old self, like someone whom everyone saw as an awkward girl. I looked like who I was: a boy in a skirt.