Originally published in Subversions Journal of Gender & Sexuality 5 (2009).

When I was seven years old a boy with shorn hair and a lisp told me that I had a moustache, and laughed. It was there, though barely; the presence of dark down on my upper lip. I spent the next ten years alternatively plucking, waxing, and shaving. I made visits to the aesthetician’s as though I was a spy, head wrapped in a scarf and sunglasses. On this particular afternoon, however, squished into a diner booth with my friends, I don’t care about that. At seventeen years old, I am Vern, who wears a too-big suit and slouches. He has dirty facial hair and eyebrows that almost touch. We’re on our way back from a youth drag show; it was mostly terrible, badly choreographed and clumsy, but our energy runs high. The waitress brings us plastic cups of water, three of them. Not enough for everyone. They are made of hard plastic, the kind that hurts if your teeth knock against the rim. I’m sitting across from two ladies who are giggling and casting sideways glances at Vern’s flat chest, his brown eyes. They make me feel sexy and invincible. I’m thirsty so I take the first glass of water. Vern does- his hand snakes across the table and grabs it for himself. The water is warm and I drain the glass in a single fluid motion. From across the table my friend says, “It’s funny, Vanessa; if you weren’t dressed in drag, you never would have taken the first glass of water.”
The first time I had sex, I was sixteen years old and hungry for something that wasn’t clear to me. When my then-partner took off my bra, his hands on my breasts were cold. That morning I had shaved my legs, my arms, and the dark downy line between my navel and my pelvis. We were in my bedroom; I pictured my virginity being dragged along with me through my life like some exhausted security blanket. Candles and music – he said he’d never thought about music being played while people fucked. Said he didn’t know anyone did that. He had a big nose and long brown hair, a small chest and big ribs with just a few hairs in the centre. His hips curved at the waist; he was self-conscious about it. He asked me if his hips were girlish and I said no. He was tall and pale and thin and when I stood naked next to him I felt heavy with brown flesh. I felt hairless enough to be transparent. I had bought spermicidal foam and Trojan condoms. The foam came in a small tube and was accompanied by the largest syringe I’d ever seen. When I broke the seal and squeezed the foam into the tube it took on life- white, frothy, expanding. I lay on my back with my legs spread and filled my vagina with drugstore foam, wincing at the cold. My then-partner, shoulder blades sharp as wings, stood across the room, embarrassed.
I’m in the airport, eighteen years old, and waiting to board a plane. I am going to Nogales, Mexico, to visit my long-distance, kindred-spirit, psychologist girlfriend. I’m wearing a skirt, a tight shirt. Blondes pass, wielding breasts and mascara. My first reaction is amusement, and then disdain. They fit the beauty mold; they are so very much of everything I have always wanted from afar and never touched. I watch the sway of their hips as they pass and think that I am no different, me with my waxed eyebrows and wedge heels. Men eye me approvingly, believing that I play into white hetero-patriarchy (my femininity cancelling out the colour of my skin). I don’t. I want a femme revolution, with sex and power and drive and strength and legacy. A femme identity telling a story that, perhaps, isn’t about repression. I feel incandescent with my dark lip gloss, knowing my sweet lover’s breath will catch in her throat when she sees me. I write in my journal, “My body’s power to arouse you means that I am worth something.” I am reading Kathy Acker, the afterword by Cynthia Carr. The last line strikes me: “In her novels, the female characters find their only truth in the body, because physical sensation is the one thing that isn’t learned behaviour. It’s where their quest for self-definition has to begin.” I find truth in my body, in the rituals I perform; I find my truth in what I deny or take away. Eighteen, waiting, I think about sensations; about power, shame. And I think about resistance.