By: Trish Kelly
I think I was going to write something about how Michael V. Smith asks about my tits like other people ask about your children. Or maybe I was going to write about my favourite fags at my place of work and how they’ve promised to let me be their houseboy when they decide they need one.
No, I was definitely going to write something about when me and MVS were on our way to Comox, BC to do a reading. We were sitting at the bus stop on the corner of Georgia and Granville waiting for the West Van bus and at first it was a little weird because we’d never been out together before, and here we were going out of town for a whole weekend. As we were chatting, this woman approached us with an offer of free publications of a biblical sort, and we politely declined. She offered again, and MVS informed her that we were probably the worst people for her to talk to, and she asked why. I started laughing in a squeaky way, like the springs of an old mattress, and the woman stared at me while Michael explained that we were very cultured, non-religious and very homosexual. She unglued her eyes from my squeaky face long enough to make eye contact with my impeccably dressed bald fag friend and say “Together?” And while I began to choke, Michael explained that we homosexuals usually do pair off, strength in numbers etc. And the poor woman stood there, so fascinated by our fascinatingness that she could not see she was being dismissed. Michael had to tell her it was time for her to run along.
That was when I decided I wanted to marry him. Like a Bebo Brinker novel, except that we wouldn’t live in the Village, we’d live in a small BC town, scandalizing people on a regular basis with our cheeky perverted ways. Because I don’t really believe in holy unions, but I am terribly excited about alliances and wars against normalcy, and I’m even willing to sacrifice happily ever after if it means I can fuck with people’s heads on a daily basis. I would be willing to marry a totally great fag with fashion sense and a big mouth even though he’s as terrified of my tits as he is respectful of my wicked mind just to be able to say that my union actually does something besides consolidate finances.
Because I will never forget the day that I described MVS as a sex radical and his eyes got so big and he said “You think I’m a sex radical?” like I’d just told him he’d won the Miss America pageant. And I nodded enthusiastically because I’m one too, and sometimes it messes with our dating possibilities, but we have each other and this shared identity is worth more than a girlfriend’s wardrobe, or a kitchen full of wedding presents. And even though neither of us gets as much action as our public thinks, yes, we are radical. Radical in the eighties sense of the word because we are fantastic, and radical in the present definition because we are never middle about anything, but scream so loud from the periphery that people have to remember there is more than a centre. We may be ambiguous, but we are not muddled: and sometimes when you mix up all the colours you get brown, but sometimes you get a hologram.