By R.M. Harper

I smoothed the dress across my chest as the Pride Parade smiled, danced, and sang its way past San Francisco City Hall. It was the kind of summer day the world paints the Bay: seventy degrees, a kissing breeze, and not a cloud in sight. Parents carried children on their shoulders to watch the floats pass by. Would it be easier for them, knowing what they could be, or are we moving backwards through the decadence of our time? 

Violet cheered the Chicanx parade group passing twirling, smiling, holding hands. Her outfit alternated pink-black, nails and denim skirt, fishnets, scales of silver eyeshadow, six-foot-two, a neon angel in combat boots. We were in the MFA program together at Saint Mary’s College, in East Bay. She was a good friend and a great Dungeon Master. I was glad she had offered to come with me: it was my first Pride. 

Entering the Civic Center I took in the panorama pink and plural. There were booths all along the Civic Center selling stickers, candy, cock rings, clothes. The crowd was making its way toward the main stage where drag queens smiled scarlet to the heartbeat drum of the stereo bass. A masc voice called out to us as we passed by. 

“Looking beautiful, girls!” 

“Aw, I know right?” Violet said. “Thank you.”  

I smiled and did not correct him. It was far from the worst thing a man could call me: I had been watching for it at every corner since we stepped out that morning in our makeup.  

“We do fundraising to support trans youth here in the Bay,” he said. “Can we get a picture of you two for our page?” 

“Oh, I’m in,” Violet said.  

The two of them looked at me. I didn’t want to claim transgender: people who did not fit into society’s binaries were the targets of hate crimes every day while I was half-closeted, male-passing most labor days even if not the neon nights. Genderfluid felt good on my tongue but I doubted how much someone assigned and socialized male could ever fully detach from gender, doubted our world could ever see me as something between two fictive lines in the sand. Still I smiled ‘round my Cherry Heat lipstick and said, “I’d love to!” 

Passerby watched as Violet and I held the banner between us. For a moment we were part of the spectacle. Look at us: in spite of it all, we’re proud to be… 

“Gayyy!” 

He snapped the picture, smiled, and turned the camera display toward us. My eye went to the self: six-one, tattooed and muscled, in a pink and white cheerleader’s outfit with the word “Sissy” written across the chest. Uncertainty unraveled into a smile. Damn, but we did look cute. 

“Thanks, girls,” the man said. “Do you want us to tag you on our socials?” 

Violet nodded, said, “For sure!” 

“I’m gonna look through this swag,” I said, and hid myself in the basket of stickers, wristbands, pins on the booth table. 

My family didn’t know I was here. My mother would pretend to be happy about it, even if she didn’t understand: maybe that was a kind of support, or maybe it was the same cowardice that kept me from telling her the truth. As for my father. . . 

I thumbed my ponytail to check it was still there. When I was eight my mother dropped me off at my father’s house for Easter. He took one look at me and shook his head. I waited to hear what I had done wrong. I waited to see if he would hurt me.  

“I’m not taking you to church like that,” he said, eyeing my shoulder length hair. It had been months since my mom took me to Supercuts, working overtime as she did to raise two children. My Nana, who picked me up from school most days, told me my red hair was beautiful whenever the kids at school bullied me. She asked me if I wanted a haircut and I said no. They had let it grow.  

My father leaned forward that day, grabbed the auburn excess between two fingers, and pulled. 

“You look like a sissy.” 

I met his narrowed eyes for all of a moment before my legs began to shake; I had to look away from the anger I saw there. He led me to a stool in the garage amid his tools and empty beer cans and plugged the clippers into the socket on the wall. Then he pressed my head down and raked the naked blade across my skin. The blades growled in my ear. I watched my hair fall away like autumn leaves shaken loose by a violent wind until the tears blurred my sight. 

I’m not ashamed that some days I feel more like a girl than a boy, but it took thirty years to earn that tenuous peace. Growing up I built an edifice of the self to society’s exacting standards of masculinity. My father was a cop: spanking was an extension of his justice. His favorite movies were Star Wars and Gladiator; he had only ever cried for The Passion of the Christ. I learned to believe when other boys and men abused me it was because I wasn’t strong enough. To prove I was a man I spent six years in the United States Military—a homophobic, hypermasculine, hierarchical monoculture where uniformity is everything.  

I wasn’t shattering that old self now, holding a banner to support trans rights—I was just growing over it with new roses. That word stenciled across the chest of my pink dress gave permission to the child who had preferred to play house with girls than sports with boys, who had identified with the femme heroines in manga, who had jumped from the highest level of the playground because there was power choosing pain in a world that wanted so casually to give it. It wasn’t my job to explain that to family, or anyone. It was my job to live. 

Violet and I waved goodbye to the man and started back toward the music. Up on stage a Black genderqueer singer gave Gaga a run for her money with their neo-soul rendition of “Bad Romance”, while dancers cut the air with leather, sash, and limb. As we entered the throng I noticed a middle-aged man looking me up and down. 

“Yeah you are, Sissy!” he said, holding out his hand for a high-five. All those years I was keeping myself safe, I had thought, by greeting masculinity with strength and femininity with beauty: these were, after all, the things each gender has been taught to value and respect. But that was never gender fluidity: it was camouflage. Now I looked into the man’s eyes and saw no violence there—so I slapped my palm to his and smiled at the sting. 

A group of naked men walked past, wearing only shoes and ribbons ‘round their cocks. I turned to Violet and said, “We could have put way less effort into our outfits.” Nearby a group of leather-bound folx were staging a dance-off with a couple in fur-suits. “Or way fucking more,” Violet said. We laughed and plunged into the rainbow. 

— 

The gold of day was dying by the time we made it back to the East Bay. Every moment outside of the house had a cost; outfits, BART fare, gay (oat milk) lattes from Philz and a cookie split down the middle for girl lunch; it all added up. With the election looming, Pride was more important than ever—but it had also become an opportunity for monetization. The crowds had sang and danced and cheered for love while people hawked food and drinks like it was a concert or a baseball game, rather than a political movement. 

We ended up at an izakaya sharing takoyaki as the twilight deepened beyond the window. Pink and bright and glowing in the old gold light of the bar we were a chiaroscuro to the brown of wood and leather amid the foaming Ichiban. Besides us there was only a family at a table behind us and the barman pouring drinks. A grad student working two jobs, I could rarely afford to eat out. But this was important too: it was part of our celebration. 

“No, you fucking listen to me,” came a masc voice behind us. “No, shut the fuck up!” 

My muscles tensed. The food went bland in my mouth. I put the chopsticks down and looked at Violet. She had noticed too.  

“I swear to God,” the man hissed, “You’re such a stupid bitch.” 

I turned in my seat and looked their way. The man was overweight, in cargo shorts and a football shirt, a hat turned to the back and a graying goatee. He was a cheap caricature, a set of hands for the keys to one of the aging Dodge Rams parked out front. The older woman—his mother I guessed—ducked her head as he laid into her. I kept staring, hoping to impart a reminder they were in public even if not that it was unacceptable to talk to another human being in such an abusive way. Eventually the man turned his eyes on me.  

“What are you looking at, faggot?” 

I blinked and looked away. 

Violet and I sat together in silence. I stared at the baseball game on the TV screen through blurry eyes. The barman stood polishing a glass, his own gaze averted from us all. My second beer bubbled near my hand, untouched. I felt soft and vulnerable in my clothes and makeup, all the beauty I had been so proud of an hour before like dry brush for the violence of a glance. How had I been foolish enough to go out like this?  

The man paid the bill and got up to leave. I had been waiting for this moment, and I knew the stakes. My fingers grazed the beer glass in case I had to break his skull. I waited to see if he would hurt me.  

He stared at me and time dilated. I stared back and saw myself, reflected pink and painted in the stranger’s eyes. Between us both I saw my father and that old familiar hate. The love and acceptance of the day rinsed clear of me like sand in the sea and in its place was the salt and cold deep enough to drown a man.  

But what would it mean, to pull him down with the same violence he taught me?  

I unclenched my hands; he passed out of the restaurant. A truck roared in the parking lot and drove away. Violet squeezed my shoulder. I taught myself to breathe again. 

“I’m ready to go whenever you are,” she said.  

“Hey, I’m sorry about that,” the bartender said, clearing our plates. “I took the beer off your tab.” 

I managed a smile.  

“Thanks.” 

It was night out, and now I looked for monsters. All the light had gone from the day save for the shimmer of stars that burn so far away that no man yet could break apart and scatter them with his hungry hands. I tried to understand why the interaction had upset me. It was just a word, and I was no longer that boy caught powerless in their father’s chair.  

There was a story here, wrapped up all nice in a bow. Far worse happened to queer people every day: I’d just slipped my mask enough to feel a small reminder of the cost of nonconformity in our culture. But to tell it true, I was far more scared when I was a man. Hell, that guy was afraid of me, and I had been trying to look a sissy-girly. 

I let my hair fall past my shoulders. There was a faint coolness on the evening breeze, and the roses and the lavender and the Russian sage filled me with a renewed appreciation for the beauty in the world. The starlings danced and whorled and headed for the nest. I smiled, and looking at Violet I thought how proud I was of us both. 

“I think that went well,” I said. 

Violet laughed. 

“Right? Sometimes you get called a fag and don’t even get a free beer!” 

We skipped down the cracked sidewalks while California dreamed, scattering with our transgress the petals of dying suburban roses dark as unspilled blood. There was no need to break what stood in our way. The patriarchs would do it themselves, eventually: they knew nothing else. All that was left was to link hands, to wear our pain with pride and keep dropping seeds until something new was born. 

---

R.M. Harper is a genderqueer U.S. Navy veteran exploring identity and culture through fiction, poetry, and memoir. A native of California’s San Joaquin Central Valley, they hold an MFA from Saint Mary’s College and were a Robert Stone Scholarship recipient at the Community of Writers. Based in Edinburgh, they spend the days working hospitality and the nights working on their first full-length manuscript, black coffee buzzed, dreaming.