Tonight there was information flowing from my days when I was young. We went out to dinner. The table next to us was having too much fun with the waiter… I don’t like the definition of any label. I knew they were gay and for me saying that doesn’t matter. Why does it have to matter at all. I just took the liberty to have fun with one of the men who was having so much fun with the waiter. I joined in. It was all too fun, who I became as a young adult had to do with gay man. They styled me. I had fun in a way which allowed me to become who I am today. I wasn’t allowed such freedom in the 60’s. However it doesn’t always work. I used the label of my age to hide behind just to have fun.
When I was young, I worked in the department store being as fashionable as I knew how to be. I had fun with the window dressers much like the fun I had with one of the men at the restaurant tonight. I was an aged fag hag as I was once called or fruit fly, this was where I began, I sold department store finery. Here I was living in my youth. Telling another story. Every morning the guys would walk in and tell me of the fun they had the night before. They went dancing at a place called Marthas. A small bar almost hidden on a back street in downtown Rochester, N.Y. In thoses days being Gay was out of the question for freedom. You had to hide at all costs. However, we were part of the Freedom generation and I was about to cross the threshold in my own style of coming out.
I asked the window dressers if I could come dancing with them. I had a freedom from the beginning of realizing what it was to be female with feelings I didn’t have a clue how to manage. Yet there I was I knew in some instinctive way I had to explore life after the confines of my mother’s hand and home. So I asked them to take me out dancing and they said they had to take me to lunch. The store was just off one of the first indoor malls and it had a food court. They sat with me and I in my openness asked what’s up? They wanted to tell me they were Gay before I could go out with them dancing. I looked at them and said “Oh I’m Gay too. Their eyes look at me in marvel from my openly ignorant response. They were being thought. In my openess I didn’t have a clue what that meant, being Gay. So many variations on that theme in the years ahead and where I grew from in that moment. I had heard “Don’t wear Green on Thursdays”. It meant you were Queer. The word wasn’t used in the terms of being Gay or accepted. My circle of life experiences frankly didn’t care. I just wanted fun.
So they were men who didn’t want a woman but a man. I was at a stage that was purely about openness and loving what is. Just having fun for the first time expressing myself and being accepted myself.
