What does a lesbian* bring on the second date?

I am moving in with my girlfriend. It is incredibly soon. We have only been dating for four months. None of our friends - who mostly consist of barely-employed social justice workers, mega-conglomerate greeting card company lackeys, university administrivia and a handful of lingering students - can keep their eyebrows in the correct place when we tell them. They either scowl or go wide-eyed. It doesn't inspire confidence.

My family, shockingly, is happy about it. They met my girlfriend back in December and , more shocking news, they really like her. This has been a weird adjustment for me because it was the first time I felt like they made an effort to like something just because it was important to me. Not that they had to make the effort, The Activist is very likable.

Also, I think they have seen the toll the last few months of my life have had on me:

1. I left a person I was with for seven years and who I have since decided is a crazy psycho, but apparently only towards me. Recently, we tried 'being friends' which ended abruptly 2 hours after it started with her telling me to "get the fuck out of my car and out of my life." The word 'telling' is a nice way of saying that she screamed it so loud the diggery-do boys from the downstairs apartment came out to see what all the commotion was. What provoked her into yelling at me was the incredible sense of angry disdain that washed over her when I told her that I am happy . . . er, happier.

2. I was told I was inappropriate to work with children because of my sexual identity and gender expression (ie because I am a big faggy queer dyke role model) and I am now involved in the tricky and exhausting process of slowly getting more and more powerful people involved in a conversation about sensitivity and awareness that is really pissing off two former co-workers, heck two former friends, who thought I would just go away quietly, apparently, with the due amount of shame and fear an unnatural, immoral abortion like me should have. (I refuse to spend another day of my life internalizing other people's lack of understanding.)

3. My intermediary girlfriend asked me over to her apartment, flirtatiously. When I got there she was packing her stuff. "I am moving to Buffalo," she said, "to give it another go with my ex." When I got up to leave, she seemed shocked, "Well, we can still fool around." I said no thanks and let myself out the back door. They broke up what felt like two weeks after she left town. She called me a while later to say that her ex was extremely jealous of me (me?) and that, "She thinks I am going to pick up and leave Buffalo and move to Kansas just to be with you." Then came the awkward silence part where, I couldn't be sure, but I thought she was hoping I would say, "Oh, yes, pleeeease, come save me." (Fuck that.) I laughed, politely, "Doesn't she know I am dating someone else now."

4. I moved back to Lawrence, to do my old job again, the one I didn't find rewarding, but at least I wasn't actively persecuted. Now I am trying to recover financially and professionally from my woeful and apparently dangerous hormone-induced unprofessionalism.

5. I got an apartment in Lawrence (the only one, BTW, without mouse shit, unfinished drywall, exposed plumbing or missing floorboards) only to move in and find that the furnace wasn't up to code (this was in November, brrr) and that neither aquilla nor westar would connect my services. So, I had no heat, no hot water, no lights, no internet . . . need I say more than no internet?

6. An unnamed person in an unnamed position of power sorta offered me a sexy job and then took it off the table.

7. I was sick for two months. The cause appears to have been mold. I won't say where the mold was, for good reasons, but I was sick a lot between 9 am and 5 pm.

But none of this has really gotten to me since I started dating The Activist. She is just my buddy, my little secret source of acceptance and love. (Along with my circus dog.)

So, we are moving in together. After trolling backpage and craigslist and every other newspaper, student newspaper, etc around we found an amazing house for rent. I made that sound a lot easier than it was. In addition to all the usual hoopla surrounding renting a house, there are few awkward steps in every encounter I have with landlords. There is the moment on the phone when they ask my name and in the nicest, most innocent feminine voice possible I say, "Billy," and they say, "B-I-L-L-I-E," and I say, "No, with a Y." Then there is the moment when we actually meet and their eyes jump from the page with my name on it (with a Y) to my shaved head to my D-sized breasts to the slight bulge in my pants. And then finally there is the moment when I explain that I don't have rental references because I owned a house with my ex-partner, no my domestic ex-partner, but my name was never on the deed.

But, I made a vow to myself recently that I would never again take a place just because it came a long at the right time or because it wasn't awful or because someone I know used to live there. I wanted to be proactive. It paid off.

When we went to look at our new home I nearly giggled and skipped around like the school girl I never was. All hardwood floors - three stories of them, 2,200 square feet of them. All original, 1910s woodwork, unpainted. A courtyard. Primo location. A restaurant-style sink. A porch swing. Perfect. And half the price of the place I am renting now.

This means no more impromptu band practice beneath my feet (and ears) no more shitty neighbors period (with all their other passive-aggressive habits). No more living half the time at her house half the time at mine. No more worrying about keeping the shitty carpet in my current place immaculate. I am moving. Sianara, crappy duplex. Hello, hardwood megaplex.

Oh, wait, did I mention the catch, huhem, I mean the lease. I was following everything just fine until the last page, "House Rules." "Uh-oh," I thought. Rules are really not my forte. The first few rules were fine- no cumbistable material, yaddee yaddee, no drug use, yaddee yaddee. It was the opening sentence to the last paragraph that caught me off guard, "No illegal, vulgar, lewd or immoral activity.”

Uhm.

I sat there for a minute. I contemplated asking my new leasing office for the list of vulgar, lewd and/or immoral activities I should avoid. But, I swallowed that little part of my soul that was shouting out, "I AM TIRED OF WORRYING THAT EVERYTHING I DO IN BED IS GOING TO GET ME BEATEN UP, THROWN OUT, JUMPED, FIRED, HELD BACK, LAUGHED AT, THREATENED, HATED, LIED TO, PANDERED TO, TOKEN-IZED and BLEED DRY again."

And I signed the fucking lease. These are the breaks when you are trying to put a roof over your bed.

*Just as a point of clarification: I don't identify as a lesbian. I identify as genderqueer or, if you prefer, genderfucked. But, the joke seemed like a fitting intro into the story.

Twinged: The 2007 Gay Straight Youth Empowerment Summit

The drive to Kansas City is frustrating. It feels like losing to a farm. But that doesn't make the flash-frozen flats of nappy wheat dotted with old bare-black cotton wood trees any less beautiful. They are the forgotten surprises of loss.

My girlfriend and I had stayed up late, typing.

We drifted out of bed, early, making mandatory doggy concessions: puffs of white breath standing in the back yard. Then I cooed in a haze of hurried encouragement when the new puppy came side-trotting my way.

Then the drive. And silence. The news. A singer had died. Odd election time reparations. The low, blinding Eastern sun and smokestacks with clouds like icicles - frozen in place.

At the summit the breakfast hall was all color. Young people armed in periwinkle, robin's egg, fuscia, tangerine and sunshine mingled beneath UMKCs bending murals by Thomas Hart Benton. One young person sat stitching an ancient wintertime panacea: a rainbow scarf. He sheathed his knitting needle in his large natural hair to shake hands with a new friend then again to take a sip off his purple juice box.

The group, crazy-haired and gender-fucked moved to the next building. The first speaker was my friend Wick, who is 20 years old. When he was in high school his parents found a photograph of him kissing his boyfriend. They threw him out of his home. It was when he was living off the streets of his small hometown in Missouri at 16 with only a part-time job for money and a high school as a guarantee of shelter that he decided to brave death threats and form a Gay-Straight Alliance at his school.

"We love you," shouted a girl in a snap-pea green sweater and dark glasses. She is the leader of his fan club.

When I first met Wick he told me, laughing, that when he is walking home at night men stop their cars and call to him. They think he is a woman. More accurately, they think he is a female prostitute. And those of us who listened and know the danger in passing for the other sex shifted a little in our shoes.

"What do you do?" I finally asked.
"I keep walking." He said.

He has weighed the choices. It is safer to be a female prostitute and ignore a John than to be a gender-bending fag that has had the audacity to turn on a straight man.

After Wick's speech we broke into groups. Our mission: design the ideal high school and draw an icon of what we bring to the school to make it a better place. In my group one youth brought ears, to listen to others with, one brought arms, to hold people in, one brought a "really big fucking mouth," to speak up for the people who couldn't speak for themselves. Our school had a lot of windows and an atrium in the middle. The center-piece of the atrium was a fountain in the shape of a peace sign with a giant disco ball. We added a library organized by the LGBTqIQA (and XYZ) decimal system. We added a free expression art and music room, a theatre, a truth in history department, a free-trade coffee stand, a public bath house and a 24-hour safe house. We decided to let "old people" attend our school as well.

Our group presented first, then we sat. And group after group got up and showed their schools all resplendent in glorious peace signs, rainbows, theatre and art departments, outdoor class rooms and more peace signs. This is what the youth at the 2007 Gay Straight Youth Empowerment Summit wanted: peace, acceptance, truth and art in their educations. ("And sex," says The Activist, raising her eyebrows.)

If only we could give it to them.