Soft

Saturday, Apr. 13, 2002 - 8:15 pm
Ap�sl�min ida corbalanyrtne 'ls�o rohl'daathi�m v� nen�a iroyss�rd.

A great big fat part of my life is lived as a staunch and stalwart male in the Straight Man's World. Most of the people I work for don't know I'm gay. Since I am an inch-and-a-fraction over 6 feet tall, weigh 185 pounds, wear size 13 boots, jeans and a t-shirt, and usually come equipped with studly accoutrements like chainsaws and trucks, my customers just assume I'm a Red-Blooded Pussy-Huntin' All-American Good Ol' Boy. I don't often disabuse them of the notion. I've never been ensconced in the famous closet (my parents knew I was a fag before I did) but I don't advertise my queerness either. Not during business hours.

But outside of business hours, if I come here to these pages and swan about, and act a wee bit fey, and call everyone luv and darlin' and grrrlfriend.... You have to understand it's a release and refuge. But even more, it's a rebellion. A rebellion armed with parody and satire. A rebellion without convictions, sanctity, or the importance of being earnest. A rebellion without a cause. But I ain't Sal Mineo.

I will make one serious pledge to you:

I will tell you when I am naked.

If I am writing one of these entries in the nude, be assured, I will let you know.

I promise.

Just so you can have the complete picture.

If you want it.

I am not naked at this moment. (Disappointed or relieved?) On the top, I am wearing winter underwear, the shirt part; the sleeves are frayed and have lost half their cuffs. The color is off-white with bits of olive green paint. On the bottom, I am wearing a pair of baggy drawstring pants. The Big Squeeze, with little imagination or tact, calls them my harem pants. I sew them up for myself, it's an easy-peasy pattern which takes me about 4 hours from bolt to cuff. Except they don't have cuffs. These that I am wearing now are made of a cotton jersey-like fabric, the color is celadon green. The underwear is a thong. Black. You can see it, faintly, through the pants.

(I don't always wear a thong, just whenever I can. I'm wearing this one because I expect the Fiend to take down my pants later tonight, and I know how pretty my ass looks in a thong.)

After business hours, when I'm at home, all my clothes are soft, and preferably old. When work is over, off come the ubiquitous jeans and steel-toed Redwings, the smelly socks and sweaty shirts. But even my work clothes are as soft as I can get them. I buy my t-shirts two sizes too large and then viciously subject them to multiple washings in the hottest water, shrinking them until they are thickened and nappy. I buy my jeans a size too big, wash them several times in hot water with a little bleach, then I hire my youngest sister's short but strapping Cambodian girlfriend to pound them with a rock. (I've had to learn to choose the color of my clothes according to how good they will look when faded.) Everything I wear at home, when I can be myself, is drawstrung and pulled over. No zippers, few buttons, and I'll tolerate snaps only on my jammie bottoms.

At home, I slide into cool, ancient cottons. The fabric that draped Egyptian pharaohs.

Well, actually, they wore more linen.

But cotton is the fabric, so they tell us, of our lives.

<~>
Ap�sl�min ida corbalan� 'lse nesgla ugar�-cham sa cru ogrulho bat�oltha al�mv�sde.

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