Sometimes Sexual Orientation Isn’t About the Gender of the Person With Whom You Have Sex… (a poem)
By Kimberly Dark
The Story He Can Understand
“Let me talk to him,” I said to her
as the officer walked around to her side of the car. A busy road on a hillside –
the kind that would wash out in a bad storm,
send little tin shacks tumbling,
foul people’s drinking water for weeks.
To our left, the ravine and barbed wire fences
that separate the nation and city of my birth
from the nation we are in.
We were driving too fast,
though offense is not entirely necessary for being stopped in this border city
by notoriously corrupt police.
Who will he be?
Police are people — different and changing. I watch his face, jaw, stance.
He is looking at our car –
a good sign.
This is not personal.
He is trying to decide
based on the age, condition and value of the car what our bribe will be.
“Buenos Dias!”
I lean across the seat, begin in a cheery tone.
He will get money
but I will try to maintain control of this interaction.
She sits beside me.
I send her a telepathic message: Please stay quiet
take no offense
make no offense.
Let me handle this.
What negotiation could I make with her in these quick moments?
I can but will her silence, hope she has nothing to say.
While we are both foreigners,
I have more experience with this culture than she. And I know enough to be a little frightened for us both.
No. No time for that. I am vigilant for us both.
I am managing both of them in this moment.
He wants to speak English, ask questions.
Talk is good and I am warm, friendly, apologetic — still speaking Spanish because she doesn’t.
She must not join this conversation,
reveal herself as a threat to his fragile gender.
And this interaction is going well.
My focus is that all of us seem like nice people with stories he can understand.
Simple stories keep us human.
Things are going well and yet,
how often is vigilance the order of the day for women?
It doesn’t matter whether the possible events are only in my head today, rather than his.
Their possibility lives in my body memory — always a certain tension in the body of one who must read others
in order to stay safe.
I am managing.
He is managing.
She is sitting quietly
and this is not always so.
She is a great storyteller!
A big presence in the room,
she lives boldly — when we’re on our home turf, at least.
In the city, never hesitates to offer me her arm
when we are walking on the street.
She opens doors for me and
publicly accepts a quick kiss of thanks
for her common chivalry.
She is good at managing things too –
the glances of onlookers, the reinterpretation as man and woman
no, woman and woman.
Dyke and woman? No. Man? No. Well.
She knows how to manage a situation too, no doubt.
One night in Denver, for example
we went in search of the perfect martini.
And this quest led us away from queer-only bars into the Friday night urban press of a string of upscale libationers.
I still can’t recommend Denver’s best martini but we laughed a lot and I fell in love with her again, the evening barely tarnished by a near incident involving our queerness.
In our joy, we sat close and spoke intimately, as many couples do in a bar, warmed by a few cocktails
but our kind are not always allowed intimacy. At one point, sitting in a booth facing the door she leaned me back for a proper kiss and one of two men walking by stopped to stare. Loudly he said, “Well what the hell do we have here?”
His tone was menacing, drawing in the attention of others, not our kind.
Without pause, she delicately unhanded me,
grew to take up all the space around us and slowly she stood, leading with her shoulders,
steady eye contact with the menacer she said
“Is there some kind of problem?”
The speaker hardened, bristled, but his buddy
(not wanting to waste a Friday night, perhaps) said “No problem here. None at all!”
And moved his friend along.
She resumed her position next to me, hand on my knee,
asked if I’d like another drink.
Next to me, in Tijuana, the officer staring in the window
I am the woman with the story he can understand. She is still big and strong and powerful
and I’m grateful that she is not acting that way now.
I’m not sure she knows that this negotiation could turn at any moment.
I would be out of this car
and letting him press against me, cop a feel as we negotiate my payment.
To protect her I would let him put me in my place if it came to that.
My desire to protect her is at least as fierce
as her desire to protect me.
I love her
and I will not end up in a Mexican jail today watching her beaten and gang raped because she is a threat to maleness
and I need to be shown the error of my ways. Women like her get the worst of it but I have survived abuses,
avoided many others,
by managing the situation.
I am smiling at him
and keeping the conversation moving.
I am answering questions about the car, a husband, my profession.
I know the right answers and she is letting me give them
until he asks her occupation.
Does she understand that he is not truly interested? He is considering our collective financial abilities — and she is proud.
Knows the word for “firefighter” in many languages and things are going so well, the conversation almost jovial.
I don’t think she really understands what is
happening here.
She has never left the United States before this trip, taken at my urging –
let alone traveled to countries where machismo rules –
where the male gender is an ever-fading mark
that must be re-inscribed many times a day
and women’s blood is the ink.
She’s never learned of countries,
such as this one,
where being gay is not defined
by the gender of the person with whom you have sex
but by the role you take in the fucking.
And women never do the fucking.
I understand that this man’s identity is a fragile glass bauble.
I can see right through him.
I will be careful with him
because we are not getting cut today.
God help you if you seem to take male privilege unduly!
And oh, my lover, you take it so well…
As she offers the Spanish word for firefighter –
a male-only job in this country, nearly so in our own — I chuckle and
(still speaking Spanish so that her machismo remains intact)
I reframe her as a paramedic
explain that in our country the two travel together and that women aren’t paid much anyway.
I am steering us back to the cost of the bribe and she does not know that I have just insulted her profession and accomplishments.
He does not have any idea,
as I haggle the bribe, pay the money, drive away that she is my lover.
That evening, safely at home in bed, she was gallant once more,
back in her element,
she took me a little more aggressively than usual — joyful at being back in a position she could command.
As she started to form the clever and funny story of the event
as she is wont to do,
I stopped her and said, “Thanks for letting me do the talking today.”
To which she replied, somber for a moment.
“I was scared.”
I nodded and then made light of the situation again, because I couldn’t stay with my own fear.
I love her bigness and would not diminish her for anything.
Masculinity is too fragile, no matter who’s wearing it, it seems.
And the truth is, we keep each other safe
even though she’s the one who walks by the street, as she offers me her arm.
Kimberly Dark is a writer, sociologist and raconteur working to reveal the hidden architecture of everyday life, one clever story, poem and essay at a time. Learn more at www.kimberlydark.com. Get your copy of Love and Errors here.
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