Guerilla Femme Beer Bust

Ah, Sunday afternoon drinking. They have a wonderful concept here called a "beer bust" where on a particular day (say, Sunday) you go into a bar and pay a set price (say, $8) and drink all you want. I'm sure that's against RSA, but they don't have RSA here, so who cares? A group calling themselves the Guerilla Femmes announced an invasion of the beer bust at a gay (mens) pub on Folsom, which I went to because I loved the sound of the name. "Guerilla Femme" evokes a lot to me from my early uni years as an outspoken "Gorilla/Guerilla Feminist" with proudly hairy legs and underarms (and big boots and short skirts)*. The group of women there seemed pretty evenly divided between the femmes of the butch/femme scene and the femme-femme dating couples who sat way at the other end of the bar. Slip and I sat in between watching the pool game- the femmes kicked the resident gay boy's ASSES and the boys retreated to the other room to sulk.

The location for all this was my favourite pub I've been into yet here (apart from the incredibly skanky toilet, singular). It has pirate flags, leather flags and rainbow flags flying out the front, the doors are thick sun-blocking rubber, the inside is pitch black and lit only by wierd techie tube lights strung up around ancient bike parts and assorted scrap metal. The walls are covered in pictures so crowded it's hard to distinguish them (vintage San Francisco portrait beside a Tom of Finland of two naked men beside a close-up of anal fisting). The music is loud and hard and there are hooks on the walls for leather jackets. It's like if the Manacle and the Phoenix got together and birthed their baby in a gay biker porn archive. Filthy and gorgeous in that dirty, proud way, reeking with history. A boy I was chatting to told me Amistead Maupin had set some stories there and that seems likely.

To the beer bust I wore an outfit that I really liked: my long raggy black crinkled skirt, boots, a strapless top, full length gloves, pink spiky collar, and my pink "BAD GIRL" belt. I haven't worn that belt in a while, but I think it may have found it's place here.

*I no longer have hairy legs or underarms. I have mixed feelings about this. I know it standardises me. That is a pro and a con, as always.

Tourist Day

Wow. Today, I felt like a tourist for the first time since I've been here. Not that I feel like a local normally, but I feel just like any out-of-towner settling into life here. Being a Tourist is something else entirely. We (me, gay boy, straight girl) caught the ferry to Alcatraz today. It was a fantastic day-trip. The whole island-with-penitentiary thing is not that exciting (although, startling and slightly chilling), but it's beautiful being in the middle of the huge bay trying to identify which cities can be seen on the horizon. The sea gulls here are enormous (upsized!), and we saw seals! Many seals! They live on floating pallets next to the very touristy wharves, which is obliging of them I think. They make a lot of noise, and they smell.

Then (crazy starving from the exertions of climbing up and down the sides of Alcatraz) we had lunch in North Beach, which is the local Norton St equivalent only with many more sex shops and peep shows, and then went shopping in China Town. I saw some of those insanely steep hills that SF is famous for (how the fuck do people's brakes handle driving down them?), and I didn't even go near climbing any of them. I bought a nice black satin handbag, some souvenier shotglasses (because if I'm going to buy souvenier crap, shotglasses appeal most) and completely fake Chanel sunglasses. I kept seeing gifts that I would like to buy for people but I'm trying to put that off until I know if I can afford it (i.e if I get a cash-in-hand job). Otherwise, you're all getting shotglasses with cable cars on them. HAH! Take that!

Supposed to go out again tonight with the Australian kids, but Slip has called, and that sounds fun too. Or I could sit at home with my bottle of Australian red ($7.99 at Safeway) and commune with a word processor. It's all good to me.

To Ride

A girl called. She wants to me to go riding with her. On a motorbike. "I'll bring a spare helmet", she said. I don't know why she wants to do this. But, oh well, guess I better go swap my flowing skirt for a pair of jeans.

Not like Melbourne

So yes, the pubs and clubs all close at 2am. This is an appalling turn of events, I know. The entire city seems to be embarrassed about it, protesting that they really are a cosmopolitan international city! Really! Just... only until 2am. Hah.

It does seem to mean that the queer scene is based very much in Melbourne-style low-key pub gatherings, frequently involving performance nights. So far these have annoyed me much less than the Melbourne ones. In fact, I've even been enjoying them. I went to a Gender Pirates performance event last night at a nice pub in the Mission, and it was fucking awesome. It's every month. I will go. The people were very attractive, the performance poetry was stellar, and even the chick-with-guitar folk was enjoyable.

I do sometimes feel a bit like I'm in Melbourne (it's cold, there is no appreciable club scene, people frown on gender-segregated queer activity) only it's more expensive and everyone has an American accent. But like I said, San Francisco is like Melbourne would be if Melbourne didn't annoy me. The people here are vastly more friendly than Melbournians. It will happen many times in a night that fun, funky, attractive people will just start conversations with me. That doesn't even happen in Sydney!

Last night the line was used on me: "Surely a girl as beautiful as you isn't here on your own..?" Which made me laugh, and then we talked about media production for a while. She had the bug-eyed response of a voyeuristic vanilla lesbian to mentions of kink though, so I didn't feel much like pursuing it.

I've been hanging out more and more with two Australian students in particular (just like I'm not supposed to). One is a sweet, sharp young gay boy from western Sydney, the other is a fun, queer-oriented straight girl from Brisbane. We just went and had an enormous meal at a pizza place and followed it with ice cream (Americans do pizza, ice cream and pancakes well. Their hamburgers suck. That is my analysis so far of the local cuisine). The boy in particular interests me- he's younger than me, and in little ways the way we talk and the questions he asks me makes me wonder if I'm taking on "queer big sister" role for him. He isn't completely naive, but he has that rushedness, the enthusiasm for any cliche or in-joke I might drop, that I remember from when I was the young queer and I found my slightly older mentors. The ones who teach you the ways to engage and position yourself in the queer scene with the benefit of their one or two years more experience. He told me, all fluttering eyelashes, about the first time a boy kissed him in a club (it sounded recent). He asked me if I thought he was well-dressed enough to go for a walk down Castro St (and would men really look at him?). He asked me, shyly, whether I thought it might be worth joining the campus queer group, if there might be boys his age there.

Perhaps it is the law of perpetual homosexuals, or something. I am a lesbian who has never been without a close gayboy friend to explore a place with and so the universe has provided once more. It will be interesting, if such lesbian-gayboy closeness develops, to see where the straight girl fits in this. And if I do take queer seniority, what will that bring out in me? Is this the way queer generations roll around?

Happy Australia Day!

Well, so I'm a bit behind the rest of you... but I hope you had marvellous times, whatever you were doing. Give me stories. Did anyone go to Big Day Out? Gayday? Drugs and picnics in the park? What went on? Are you still recovering? I am midway through an extremely mundane week of orientation, and I need to know!

The Australian exchange students (all four of us) are trying to plan something involving beer + bbq this evening... that's about as exciting as it gets on this front.

The strip club was kind of wierd and uninspiring. I mean, I feel that it's A Good Thing to have a women-run, lesbian-oriented strip show in a women-owned bar- I'm very happy for the local community that they can have that. But something I've always felt about Gurlesque is that if the dancer doesn't seem to be having fun, then I feel wierd about being there. I can get easily carried away and caught up with shows that are brave and imaginative, sexy or hilarious or both, that have a strong dose of originality or personality. Even very standard professional stripshows can be fun when the dancer seems to be getting into what she's doing. And perhaps that's dodgy of me- not all people in the sex industry are there because they want to be, and maybe it's unfair of me to demand that the naked dancing girl seems to be having fun on top of the whole show she has to do. But something turns my stomach about me, fully clothed and paying customer, sitting and staring at the act of a naked girl who looks like she'd much rather have her clothes on and perhaps be doing the grocery shopping or typing out an email than dancing for an audience.

Apparently over here the dancers do not get paid, they receive only their tips (knowing that makes me wonder why the door fee is so high, if it is not to support the dancers). So the shows aren't so much 'shows' as progressions of women taking their clothes off and soliciting tips from the audience. It's a very different thing to a Gurlesque show, where the performer has seven minutes and a whole stage to fill. The dancers last night didn't even have a stage, they had a gap between the chairs and then they were mostly off in the audience gyrating for tips. I have no idea how that experience would pan out for a dancer, but it didn't do a lot for me. The performers kept being introduced with descriptions like "She's a left-wing grrrl to set you racing! She's for sexual freedom of *all* kinds!" and then the dancer would appear and strip down to a spangly g-string. I don't know, I just felt like the opportunity of obviously talented dancers, a nice club space, and a paying audience of all women could have been used a lot more creatively.

Today orientation started for new international students. It was very boring, but I met two nice boys who are apparently convening officers of the campus queer group. That was a bonus.

Oh, and the insanely gorgeous boy in chaps from the other night? Has a girlfriend. To be expected in the dyke world. I guess it doesn't hurt to look.

on a slightly related note...

I do feel free. Scared and free. Which was the point of course, to scare myself and free myself from the rigid self home turns you into. Now I'm not at home, and I feel free. A long way away from the comfortable, limiting dynamics. Miss them and loathe them at the same time. I think this is why this adventure was agreed by all to be 'good for me'. It's not just about how long it will take me to conquer this city, is it?

Current soundtrack is Scissor Sisters, "Take Your Mama", of course.

Newcomers

I am a hopeless Kylie Minogue fan. We all know this. "Giving You Up" makes me very happy. Across the landing my housemate is listening to loud, obnoxious rock. So I am making it my mission to play loud, obnoxious pop on the dodgy speakers of this rattly little laptop. It suits the bright, sunny, freezing cold afternoon. If I climb out the window above my reading corner, as I often do, I can sit on the flat concrete roof of the kitchen and sun myself. Sun, while wearing a jumper, a coat, and a scarf, of course. I can hear my pop out there, and the small children shrieking in the park behind the house. I can see squirrels climb out of the tree to sunbake in the railings of the deck below me.

I have been reading "States of Desire: Travels in Gay America" which is absurdly appropriate to everything right now. I quite love the book, both the information it presents and the sweet, sort of nostalgic glow it has (it was written in 1980). I especially like how every now and then author will very casually mention how he had sex with this or that interviewee, and by the way, did he mention how great his politics are? He is constantly apoligising for leaving lesbians out of his story, but has a fervent admiration for the politics of women who will not let him speak for them. It's a nice book. I finished it today, which is sad. Now what shall I do?

I am listening a lot to the CDs Justin burnt for me. Radio here is either very bland, or very far from my personal tastes. I haven't been to a club yet so I don't know what the club scene is like. I went out last night to the dyke bar with Slip, and the music was all bogstandard jukebox with a lesbian folk music twist (mmm, exciting). The bar was nice though, small and crowded with Lesbian types (many of them I kept mistaking for women back home, proving that lesbian archetypes travel far). Slip and I got horribly lost on the way home so it was very late when she tucked me into bed, kissed me in the very soft way of a girl yet to figure out that other girls won't break when you kiss them, and then drove herself home. Apparently I do not need to keep my eyes open for girls with cars- everyone here has a car.

I'm going to a lesbian strip club tonight. Someone tell me all about Gurlesque, and I'll tell you all about this one. Deal?

She Plays, I Play, We Play

Hurrah for perverts! Hurrah for queers! And especially, hurrah for queer perverts!! Now I am feeling an awful lot more settled in. Now I can see myself in this city a little better. I feel less adrift in a desert of bland and more like there might be some oases (plural of oasis?) visible on the horizon. Also, I can verify with absolute certainty, there are good-looking queers in San Francisco.

I was torn on what to wear, of course. The way my personal style vacillates wildly between vaguely-punk alt girl and her demure, proper, femme big sister was showing through in the dressing stage. Knee-length pleated skirt, black velvet W&DB top, stockings and patent heels? Or pinstripe, buckle-bound minidress with armbands, fishnets and big boots? I decided I felt more comfortable in the buckle-bound minidress, threw a pair of trousers beneath it for added warmth (and extra special resemblance to Miss Little Peaches, although I took them off once I got there) and headed out. I'm quite pleased that I managed to find the place. It mostly involved walking down what looked the right street, seeing a leather boy in tight jeans, leather vest and white t-shirt heading towards a building, and thinking "Wait! That ass is far too cute to belong to a man! She's going where I'm going!" And so she was.

I didn't actually play at the play party, but I'm not annoyed at myself for turning down offers... I had good reasons. I am far less likely now than I was a year ago to leap into a public display of perversity that I'm not entirely comfortable with, with someone I scarcely know. I was more than happy to mingle, chat, and admire the scenes in progress. I will have to revisit the space in future though, because, wow. Incredibly well equipped (even if the bottom dungeon did feel a little bit like an arcade, with a scene going on every two metres. That would distract me).

I joined in the newby intro games as a way of flirting with two people: the devilishly handsome older presenter, and a slip of a girl in a black dress with long blonde hair and huge blue eyes who sat herself next to me, tossed her hair in my direction and said "hi! Who're you?" in the cutest possible way. At one point in chatting the presenter said, "Oh, my girlfriend's name is Ali", and the blonde girl said "What a coincidence, I'm going to have a girl called Ali also", to which I could only tangle my hand in her hair and laugh.

I also found out a great deal about the local pony training scene, which made me bounce and grin from ear to ear (so much so that the woman talking to me said "oh, look at your smile! And I didn't even have to touch you!"). I tried chatting to the presenter for awhile but quickly tired of the "look at the enthusiastic newbie! Isn't she adorable!" vibe I was getting from the friends around him, and drifted off. For a while I sat on a sofa playing a cruising game with a pretty boy in jeans and chaps, that involved him standing against a railing, hand hooked into belt loops, looking somewhere at the middle-distance behind my ear, and me looking him up and down and away at rhythmic intervals. It all ended when I got bored (and people kept walking between us) so I just walked up and introduced myself. He is even better looking up close, enthusiastic and friendly, and is starting at my uni the same day I start. The way the words came bubbling out of both our mouths, the way we both rushed to agree with each other when there was nothing in particular to agree on, suggests to me that the "Wow! Gorgeous!" was not one-way. He suggested that if the queerspace is not open at uni by the time we start, we will knock the door down together and stage a liberation. His name is something extremely girly that I cannot reconcile with his presence (I had to stop myself from an inelegant "huh?" when he told me).

He and his (equally good-looking, extensively body-modded) housemate gave me a ride home, and I skipped and giggled all the way to my door. Had sweet dreams of pretty girls and handsome boys... and the day outside is beautiful, and I cannot remember my problems.

Stupid girl.

Stupid, stupid girl. Three weeks. In the space of three weeks, how many times can one stupid girl lose her keycard? To add to the fun of this particular game, can we put our heroine on the other side of the world with very little money in her pocket so that her accomodation and survival is contingent on accessing the (now inaccessible) money in her bank account?

Stupid girl!

I cried and cried last night. It's amazing how far from home a perilous financial situation will put you. I mean, it might be ok. There are always ways around. But I really, really didn't need this.

On the upside, apparently when it's cold here the sky is bright blue and the sun shines. When it warms up the fog rolls in and covers everything. It's mostly been very cold while I've been here. And this morning I saw a raccoon.

Swish

I've been offered permanently the room I'm staying in (which was only meant to be a week or two). It is huge and beautiful, fully furnished, with a massive walk in wardrobe and a view over a private neighbourhood park from the windows. I share the bathroom with one other. It is perfect, and in the lower rent price range for this astronomically expensive city. The huge house sits on a hill which is the equivalent of Vaucluse or the Lower North Shore with it's mansions and manicured gardens, but a short walk from a bustling and inexpensive shopping strip and transport junction.

The downside of course is the people I live with: straight, straight-laced, middle class. The house is owned by an elderly retired gentleman who lives in one room and rents out the others to a succession of students to supplement his income. The man I share my floor with is a mostly harmless seeming young electrical engineer (if I take the room I can get free net access by slinging a CAT5 between our windows), and a mysterious law student lives in the basement. Can I go from living in the free, perverted, queer paradise of House of Femme to this and remain sane? I'm not sure. I suppose the test will be if I bring someone home: can it be done? Will it freak people out? Can the sort of women I like be brought back to the house at all? Because if I can have the sort of company I want to keep then the house will be just perfect. But otherwise I may be forced to flee to more expensive climes with smaller, poky, unfurnished rooms where my perversities are better tolerated.

Anyway, I have a date tomorrow, so I'll see how that goes (the person in question may provide just the litmus test I'm looking for). And tomorrow night is a play party, oh joy! So I may finally meet some of those pervy queers my visit has so far lacked. If I come out of all this with a thoroughly tanned hide, I will be the first to let you know.

I saw a squirrel today! It was on the railing of the back deck washing itself in the sunshine. Cute, and cute! Possums are nothing on the cute of squirrels.

'the tenderloin' is the most notorious area of this city, where even the seedy strip clubs have heavy bars across the streetfronts, and walking outside at ten in the morning is hair-raising at best.

I bought a pretty dress yesterday! It is pink with big red roses all over it and a full skirt with netting underneath it to give extra swish. It looks fantastic with my white t-bar heels and pearls. It was less than half price, which means it was almost nothing at all (new clothes here are inexpensive, but second hand is for some reason quite pricey). All I need now is somewhere to wear it...

And now I must decide whether it is worth spending a sizeable portion of my limited funds on the laptop and digital camera I was planning on owning for this trip... both would make a big (positive) difference to my life here, but in the face of the huge living expenses this city demands, both look a little like luxuries. And I can't afford luxuries. So... grrr. Will be puzzling over that one for a few more days, I think. And no more pretty dresses for me, no matter how bargain they are!

Head Trauma

It's all sweetness and sunshine and light now, but this morning and all yesterday it was grumpy and gloom. Oddly enough I seem to suit the suburbs of this city much better than it's (grey, towering and grimy) core. Getting on the Muni out to see the university for the first time has been the most fun thing I've done since I got here. Except for sleeping. I've slept a lot. And ate a stupidly huge breakfast at a cafe called the Moulin Rouge, which was run by an elderly Chinese couple, serving "All American Big Breakfasts". Me and my Aussie room mate were the only two eating in there, so I think we had the cross-cultural aspect covered.

Trust me to travel to the other side of the world only to spend the first two days hanging out with a queer, Newtown-dwelling, community-sector employed fellow traveller. I mentioned Tilda and she named three of my workmates or bosses who have fixed computers at various of her workplaces. She has left now though for colder climates, so I may be left to mingle with the natives.

The American accents are astounding. They are visibly different, one to the next- clipped sit-com tones next to long drawling talk-show voices. Suddenly my none too All-Australian voice sounds like sweet Sandra Dee circa 1973. It's hard not to get so self-conscious mid-sentence that I just cut myself off.

I haven't been to the gay bit yet- haven't even called anyone who might be able to show me around (I managed to phone home, but haven't managed to call a local number yet). That's my project for later today, try to make contact a bit more and find places I might settle in, or might at least recognise as a little bit comfortable to myself. I took my bags from my youth hostel hoping very much not to spend another night there. It is a lovely art-deco building in the middle of the Tenderloin, and that neighbourhood is just a bit too much for a fresh-faced white girl to have to cope with straight off the plane. I would rather stay out in these sunny suburbs but I doubt they have youth hostels out here.

---

(rewind, step back, this is the bit about the weekend)

I had the best farewell weekend. Messy enough that fragments of it are only just coming back to me now. Apparently pink chamagne and cosmopolitans are to my inner shameless hussy as spinach is to Popeye or white power pills to Roger RamJet. She was out in force on Saturday night. Oh, she was a little flirt- and quite successful, too. I wonder to myself how I managed to get away with such shenanigans. Perhaps it's the privilege of leaving the country, that you get to play with pretty girls and handsome boys with few of the usual concerns. I only caused havoc twice that I am aware of- once flattening a table in the Phoenix, which I maintain was the boy's fault as he was supposed to be holding me up. I can't be expected to remain upright during a spanking all on my own, can I? The second time no-one saw but the bouncer of the club, when I went skipping up a flight of slippery stairs in four inch heels and tumbled out onto Oxford St, chin-first. So yes, there was head trauma- it is still bruised and marked, but not as badly as it has been the past few days. I may even let attractive people see me soon (I did not want to come bursting onto the local scene as "the girl with the facial deformity").

So to everyone who helped me say goodbye to Sydney, thankyou!! I had a marvellous time. Even if I live like a nun here for the next six months, I think enough naughtiness went on to keep me sustained.

(I miss you terribly)

It's been fun

I came thisclose to skipping work tonight. I am itching to no longer be here. I know that it is this job that keeps my feet buried in the weird place of denial that has no concept of leaving the country on Monday, it is this bad air-con and grey laminate that blocks the excitement and urgency from rushing through me. I still have a long list of Things That Must Be Done before I go, and I seem to be entirely unaware that the days in which to do things are running short. I cannot imagine a time of not waking up to come here and plod through a shift, to jitter my way through the bizarre hours between 2am and 6am that define the strangeness of this job. I came so close to just giving it up, calling it off, and going to the pub instead. But I didn’t. I came. And my reward is another whole shift of such joy.

I have been over-booking myself dreadfully. I was going to the beach today but had forgotten that I needed to sleep, and that sleep doesn’t just happen between 8am and 10am with plenty of time left to enjoy the day- it doesn’t work like that, at least not without a minor amphetamine habit, and I do not have me one of those. I booked myself in for dinner on Sunday with another friend and then realised I haven’t actually left myself any time to pack between now and Monday. I dream about going to the Phoenix on Saturday night after my party, throwing my hands up and dancing to hard tribal until the sun is hot and bright outside, but I don’t know if even that will be possible.

I don’t want to feel like the bad friend before I go away. I don’t want to feel like backing out of this plan makes me uncaring or cold, or like my rush and distraction when I do see you means I am not focused on you. I will take tomorrow night off for you, and the night after that. I will come and play with you, if you let me.

(I have stars on my shoulders, and I love them)

Forever

It’s very noticeable, the vast gaps in the way I see This Big Adventure. Most of the time, and for the entire period it has been in planning phase, it is an abstract and stupidly difficult administrative problem, a challenge of contorted procedure that I am embarking on for it’s own sake. “I’m going overseas” is not a statement of any sort of plan, or intention, just an explanation as to why I work stupidly long hours, spend days queuing up in obscure offices of obscure branches of governments not my own, wake up and spend hours on the phone to call centre peons much like myself. “I live in a shed because I’m going overseas”, and “I’m trying to save money because I’m going overseas”. It’s a magical statement, guaranteed to incur everyone’s interest. And yet it still surprises me when people respond with the expectation of excitement. Because who would get excited over my boring little self-inflicted bureaucratic drama?

And then there’s the other time- which is growing more and more frequent as the paper hurdles fall away- when I find myself just grinning stupidly, so happy, so happy, I can nearly taste the different air on my tongue. It can switch like a heartbeat, take me by surprise- midway through a sentence it comes, and trips me up. Into possibilities and daydreams and intentions. So soon. So soon. Nearly now. Without you. By myself.

I’m going to catch a cable car and go to an art museum and drink at a lesbian bar and eat a bagel and a hot dog and talk to people with American accents all the time! I will walk on the sidewalk and pay for things with money that is all the same colour and see a redwood tree and meet people who do not know where Australia is. I will do this by myself, and save up little bits of stories to tell people. I will miss you so much when I turn around to make a joke about some passing exciting thing and you won’t be there.

I’m going to miss that boy a lot. My housemate said, “yeah, six months is nothing, no time at all. Unless it’s six months and you’re on the other side of the world and even going to the supermarket to buy food is an adventure! Then six months is forever.”

night shifting

If I never text you, it’s probably because at that period of my waking hours when my brain is most likely to feel sharing and communicative, it is 3am and I think it would be rude to interrupt your sleep with those piercing beeps. Of course, a part of me is eager to rip your sleep to shreds the way mine is regularly destroyed (woe is the sleep of a night shifter who cannot bring herself to switch her phone off while sleeping). But anyway, I probably want to go and have coffee with you (or maybe some non-caffeinated beverage instead?) and it should be soon, and you’d probably better book in now. My spare afternoons are a non-renewable resource, and will soon be passed a very long way away from here.

I am discovering the freedom of doing a night shift without the radio on (much as, a few weeks ago, I discovered the liberty of the airwaves). To be released from Nova’s 2-hour all-night repetition soundtrack! It is a bliss of sorts. I have not heard Flashdance since the weekend, and I’m not sorry.

Slightly Disjointed

Eating a mango at my desk (cold and perfectly ripe- sweet but still tangy). Such an obscene process. Might as well have juice of woman dripping down my chin, onto the not-grey-not-white laminated not-wood. A cliché, but for an extremely good reason.

At least I’m working on my own (the graveyard shift doesn’t justify the pay of two workers. Or, apparently, any sort of security system). I’m not fit company right now for anyone but myself. My head is still pointedly reminding me of the careless abuse of the weekend, which should have wound down to rest at some point but instead soldiered on as though to prove some sort of point. Of course, I cannot resist going out to play when such charming company is on offer, and the playgrounds are so pretty. And it’s New Years, and I have to say goodbye properly, and as many other excuses as are required to drag a not-unwilling young creature of the scene out into music and bright lights and little baggies of bad goodness.

I wanted a bedtime story so bad the other morning. I even think I might have taken myself home for the sake of one. I am not so used to rituals of caring, but the appeal is immediate. I wanted a story with a princess and a pony, which I was told might be too hard, but later in the day half-asleep I came up with lots of stories about princesses and ponies. I couldn’t quite tell which character I was identifying with more- I wound up giving the love interest to the princess, but the pony was the one who facilitated most of the story. The love interest, in a twist that surprises no-one, turns out to be a passing butch on the princesses guard. Goodlordalmighty, I am predictable.

2004 was absolutely the year of being told “I am so glad we can be such good friends” (as in, “isn’t it nice that we aren’t letting all that raunchy hot sex we could be having ruin this lovely friendship!”). I intend to get extremely proactive in eliminating that phrase from my life in 2005. Hold me to it.

Fifteen Days

Two weeks. TWO WEEKS. Monday the 17th. I'm out of here. I've spent all weekend pounding my brain with parties- Pride on Friday, Queer Nation on Saturday, Kooky tonight. Weird. I'm having party fun in the last few minutes of this life I suppose because I know, everyone around me knows, that the same person isn't gonna come back into the country. It's gonna be a different sort of life I step back into. And I've set up this life so comfortably for myself, these modes of living and working and having fun, the people, the wardrobe, the music, the drugs, the locations… I'm ready to get out of it, but I need to say goodbye properly. It's been good to me. Also a total bitch to me, but you get that I suppose.

I had a truly awful photo taken of me on the balcony at Queer Nation last night, surrounded by what I would call 'my girls' if I was that sort of person (but really, just a large group of female friends who were also there). I think I've forgotten how to pose. But I would like the photo to take with me, if it gets published. For people who put so very much effort into dressing up so regularly, we don't have nearly enough photographic evidence to say so. I'll miss that (my bright, visible friends).

What I don't think I'll miss is the choking, smothered feeling I get around that crew, the habits I've had to learn about not saying, not looking, never admitting. I don't think I'll miss that at all. Sometimes there are things that I'm fairly sure I should say- commonplace, nice things, entirely acceptable- but I can't, because there is so much background story that never got said. Without that context, everything I say is a lie anyway. So I don't bother.

They played Basement Jaxx, "Get Me Off" last night- I haven't heard that in a club context for so long, and never somewhere as big as Home nightclub. It feels like having a dirty little secret aired over the loudspeakers, it's such a sexy song. It puts absolutely impure thoughts in my head and kind of makes me want to run away to fuck violently in the toilets, but not until the song's finished, because dancing to it is so good.

I've been at such big parties all weekend, unfamiliar spaces and unfamiliar people, that I've spent so much time absorbing and experiencing and not nearly enough dancing. Tonight is familiar, the little holes under the city that I always go to, so dancing will be first on the agenda. The sort of places I know so well that full-head-turn checking out of cuteness is possible without once missing the beat, because I know the space and how the crowd moves.

The question is, then (after coming up with two big outfits already this weekend), what the hell am I going to wear?