Honey

I’m operating on minimal sleep today and feeling a little loose, if you know what I mean. I wonder what I’m going to say and I wonder if I’ll look back on this post later and sigh.

I won a raffle at Dirty Queer last night. I’ve won a couple of raffles this year and I’m feeling pretty good about that. My mom used to say that I was lucky. She’d let me pick the lotto numbers. My grandpa always let me bet on whatever horse I liked, even though I never really had any good reasons behind my choices. I really loved going to the race track with my grandpa. I felt so special and grown up and it was an adventure every time.

So this is what it’s going to be like. No clean beginning, middle, and end to this post. I’m going to just ramble through and maybe the tangents will braid into a beautiful knot. I’ve always wanted to learn how to tie intricate, complex, and symmetrical knots.

Back to Dirty Queer.

I didn’t really know what to expect when I showed up at In Other Words* last night. I certainly wasn’t expecting 115 queers packed into a little bookstore. The lovely host, Sossity Chiricuzio, explained the rules and the objectives in a few different ways throughout the evening and by the end, I had a little better understanding than when I had walked inside.

First of all, I’d like to take a moment to appreciate being surrounded by 115 hot queer people in a feminist bookstore on a Friday evening, eager to share and to support each other. I know I’ve told you this before, but I’m just going to keep saying it until you feel the same way I do. I love Portland. I love Portland more than anywhere else in the world. Sorry, San Francisco. I think I’m finally over you.

Dirty Queer is an open mic. If you’re queer (like me), you’ve probably been to a couple of open mics. This one’s a little different though, seeing as how it’s intended to be X rated, a celebration of sexuality. All kinds of creative performance are encouraged: poetry, stories, charades, dancing, anything you can think of. Sossity did recommend that whatever you do, it deserves at least an R rating.

I was very impressed by the courage of my fellow queers to stand up there in front of all those people and talk about sex. In a society insistent on suppressing sexuality in all its forms, I thank the universe that I get to be queer and part of a community that is willing to talk about sex and think about it and share stories about it and grow through it rather than being tortured by it. Sometimes I feel like the luckiest person on earth. So I guess it made sense that I won the raffle.

Dirty Queer was only an appetizer, though. I tucked all that good energy in my back pocket and headed to Gaycation, quite possibly the funnest (is that a word?) queer dance party in Portland. Gaycation happens once a month, and it happens at Holocene (which is nonsmoking, thank gawd), and it’s packed and crazy and so much fun I can barely stand it. Ali and I fulfilled our tradition of dancing on stage, above the crowd with barely enough room to scoot our feet around in a little shuffle dance maneuver. I danced and danced and danced all night long, while the crowd got stinky and pixilated and rude and then genial again. Standing outside in the cold after most everyone had already left, my body felt spent and content. Oh, it feels so good to dance it out.

On little sleep this morning, I tied Miso to the seat post of my bike and rode through the crispy yellow leaves all the way downtown for the protest against Proposition H8. Quite a few people crowded around a little stage while our local motivational speakers yelled through a bullhorn about solidarity and hope. I kept wanting to ask someone, “ok, so what now?” The ACLU canvassers who wandered around the edges of the crowd, fishing for supporters sure had the answer. “Money talks.”

(This knot is not symmetrical and seems a little tattered at the ends. There’s only so much I can do on short notice.)

Before I forget, I also wanted to make a shout out to my new friend. How do you do the terrorist bump over the internet?

* In Other Words Women’s Books and Resources is the last surviving non-profit feminist bookstore in the United States.