Disclosure in Mississippi usually involves counseling a dude through the five stages of grief.

Last night a Marc Jacobs look-alike with a caesar haircut messaged me on OKCupid to tell me that he wanted to fuck. I was flattered but occupied, probably getting ready for bed by brushing my hair 100 times and reciting scripture. Ignoring handsome men is a really valuable technique because they’re usually not prepared for it and it doesn’t take very long for them to get desperate and up the stakes to get your attention. About an hour after his first message–right on schedule–”Marc” messaged again, this time sweetening the deal a little: “I really want my head between your legs. I have a really big hoop in my schlong.” I responded approvingly and–because he hadn’t actually read my profile–he asked if I wanted to meet him at his apartment in Brooklyn.

In about two weeks I’m flying to New York for my first experience inside the liberal bubble, and in an effort to streamline the process of meeting either one or many perfect NY dates, I set my location to NYC on OKCupid and let the guys come to me. I’ve been on OKCupid for years, but all that means for a trans woman in Mississippi is having to field a lot of vulgar questions about my gender and my body from countless inarticulate townies. All of my hard feelings about it melted away once I started getting cruised by NYC’s queer conscious liberal men folk.

I’ve found a number of different ways to prepare for my trip emotionally, including overeating, buying clothes on credit, and scrutinizing my naked body for new flaws to fixate on, but none of those methods are quite as helpful as setting up dispassionate liaisons with strangers I meet on the internet. Oh, dear reader, how I am excited to meet the rakish liberal arts majors ensconced in New York’s crummy apartment buildings, waiting for the perfect response to their Casual Encounters ads.

We exchanged some pictures my mama would be embarrassed to see.

When I told Marc that I wasn’t in the city yet, I decided it was also a good time to tell him that I’m trans, because I like to get it out of the way as early as possible in any communiqué wherein the goal is organizing a tryst. Marc was surprised and a little doubtful but completely amiable about it. We then exchanged some pictures my mama would be embarrassed to see.

Disclosure in Mississippi usually involves counseling a dude through the five stages of grief–often spending the greatest amount of time on anger and the least on acceptance. So far, disclosing to my NYC suitors has been either a complete non-issue or has bummed them out, which is an entirely new experience. One incredibly cute tall-haired DJ complained that fat women were never interested in him because he’s so thin, citing “gender roles or something” as the likely excuse. This was somewhat poetic when he (very, very sweetly) told me that he wasn’t interested in trans women and thanked me for my honesty. Not to be all The Hussy about it, but I kinda felt bad for him that he wasn’t going to get to fuck me! I was really rooting for him.

The slim, swarthy activist who wanted to spank me just stopped talking altogether when I told him, which I guess is a relatively elegant way to let someone know you no longer want to hit them for your own gratification. One kind of scruffy greaser type, who’d introduced himself to me by asking if I would indulge some complicated fantasy involving forceful cunnilingus, was unmoved by the revelation. If it changed the nature of his fantasy, he didn’t tell me, but I eventually got bored by his youthful enthusiasm.

One dude, whose proudly highlighted mop embarrassed me so much I could scarcely appreciate his thick and stubbled jaw, did tell me that I was “gross,” but he was also polite enough to say “bye” before he blocked me. I respected him in kind by not saying anything about the hair. The 20 year old college student has gone dark since I told him, and even though I was kind of looking forward to working my witchy magick on his dopey ass, I don’t miss him. He was exhaustively persistent and trying to match his fun-20-year-old vibe was really making me feel my age. I think it might have hurt my feelings to put on as much under eye concealer as I’d need for that particular hook-up.

A tall thick necked actor has emerged on whom I’ve decided to pin most of my aspirations. How he’ll respond to the news remains to be seen, but I need you all to cross your fingers that we will be wed by the time I’m meant to board my return flight to Mississippi. If he’s not interested in my company once he finds out I guess I’ll just call the “Volvo-driving Bernie Sanders socialist” that didn’t give a shit, or drunkenly sit too close to one of the girls I want to kiss.

I don’t think I’ll be hooking up with Marc, though his dick piercing actually was huge and he proved it by sending me a very pleasing .mov. His interest in me waned when I wouldn’t Skype with him and he was reduced to jerking off alone to a selection of my lousy Photo Booth nudes. Considering the fact that his was among my more promising OKCupid exchanges, you should probably just cross your fingers for me either way.

You can check Alice out for yourself by visiting her OKCupid Profile.

“I believe that Newark should be a just community.”

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Mayor Cory A. Booker, one of the most popular politicos in the US. Our conversation focused on a topic that is often overshadowed, if not wholly ignored, within mainstream media outlets reporting on the Mayor’s tenure and issues of concern within the city of Newark, NJ

Newark has been cast into the national spotlight with its appearance in Sundance Channel’s documentary series, Brick City, and as the location where Mark Zuckerberg invested $100 million in educational reform from his Facebook fortune. Yet, there is much more to know about New Jersey’s largest city, especially as it relates to the many remarkable strides that have been made on behalf of the LGBTQ community in Newark.

But the problem of the media’s silence and lack of focus on queer activism within majority black and brown and working class spaces may also have something to do with the perpetuation and maintenance of the belief that such spaces are ostensibly more homophobic than some others. Indeed, it seems fair to argue that mainstream gay news outlets may not think activism actually occurs within working class spaces where queers of color live or is not important enough to cover than, say, marriage equality (which is no less important than LGBTQ youth homelessness, public safety concerns, and transphobia, yes?).

It is for this reason that Newark advocates have begun to highlight the great work happening in Newark. The social media campaign, of which this video is part, is aptly titled, We are Making Newark Better. And, what a perfect title to speak to the work of a community that has advocated for the city’s (and state’s) first municipal commission on LGBTQ concerns, the raising of the rainbow flag on the steps of its city hall during pride week, the launch of an archive project on queer Newark, a policy brief on the state of LGBTQ youth, and much more.

Mayor Booker has been a committed advocate of every initiative. Check out the video to hear why.

What homosexuals need are not more and more ways to pretend that we matter, but fewer and fewer occasions to acknowledge the world that real people constantly try and drag us into.

What a terrible, confusing couple of days this has been for homosexuals living in America! Between the rope-a-dope situation presented and then played out by North Carolina’s Proposition One campaign and the stamp of approval President Obama subsequently graced us all with, I can understand why so many of you seem so unhinged. Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.

As you may expect, however, I have not come here merely to replay political events that have transpired over the past few days–that information is widely and already known. I am also not reaching out to you, dear readers, to chime in with the very familiar responses that I’m sure members of your queer communities have already littered your Facebook walls and clogged your poor ears with. Protest against national political situations is a game that any number can play; if you want to hear the screeching refrains of hopeless anger, you can go and sing them yourself.

What I have to offer you is a way out of the insulting and uncomfortable situations that any political involvement offers. Political rights, it seems, are not something that American citizens feel homosexuals deserve. Moreover, as self-proclaimed queers, we assume a position of moral superiority when the issue of gay marriage comes up, mistaking political critique as an intelligent, or even recognizable, form of participation in current events and matters of culture.

Politics make us defend ourselves and then admit defeat.

The mistake that has been made has been in seeing ourselves as somehow worthy of a political voice, of our queer politics as being some kind of well-oiled, sanctimonious version of what real people do when they enter the political arena. But, as my dear home state has clearly reminded us this week: the difference between real people and homosexuals is in kind and not in degree. In other words, politics is a way of life for real people, who inevitable and always have had what they–and unfortunately we–have lovingly referred to as rights in this world.

Politics is a game they play and that they have already won; the only thing we lose when we lose politically is face. What homosexuals need are not more and more ways to pretend that we matter, but fewer and fewer occasions to acknowledge the world that real people constantly try and drag us into. The mistake to be made in this case is to speak about politics in any way that acknowledges its importance in our lives and livelihoods. Why develop an opinion or break a sweat defending rights that we don’t have? Let the heterosexuals have their victories; what homosexuals have never had homosexuals will never miss.

Ambivalence is the only concerted effort I would like to see any of you make when faced with invitations into any political arena–a problem that, unfortunately, is coming to pass in this election year. In the meantime, I would like to alleviate you of the nagging and annoying burden of having to respond any further to events that have already transpired this week with respect to the so-called gay community in this country. Political rights are, like immortal life and signs of the zodiac, human inventions–stupefying forms of getting you to exist in comparison with other people. Equality is only a vehicle for mediocrity and any political engagement–from liberal to radical, gay all the way to queer–sets up a path towards being like real people.

Politics make us defend ourselves and then admit defeat. What’s worse, taking politics seriously wastes time that we should be wasting ourselves. Once homosexuals admit that they don’t matter and that they don’t deserve political rights, the work is done. Think of what benefits to your personality and style avoiding political discussion might have: instead of repeating over-determined and sadly predictable opinions on matters of national importance, your life will be filled with time you can set aside for thinking about yourself and getting away with things.

To be more specific: in the coming months leading to the presidential election, I am requesting that you all refrain from developing any opinions, voicing any concerns or participating in any forums which might otherwise be considered to be open to the public. Don’t vote: not out of apathy, but out of stoic ambivalence. Remember what I am sure we all knew well when we were in school–that we have names for people who run for president, of our class or otherwise: assholes.

As queers, I can be certain we also know full well what to call their followers: groups of assholes. We also–I am sure–know how assholes smell. Let’s not make the mistake of getting ourselves close to one.

Say nothing negative about your worst enemies and leave the Mitt Romney jokes to the idiots at Saturday Night Live. More importantly: voice no words of obvious, pre-recorded support for or against our current Commander in Chief who–as we all know–has finally given his fair-weather approval to the rights of homosexuals across the country.

Our response to any attention from heterosexuals should be the same as homosexuals throughout time have known instinctively, but that visions of political relevance have led us to forget. Smile when spoken to; keep opinions about real people under your breath and effect not to have them–hoping one day you won’t. When asked to mix in with the real world, compliment its dress and make jokes with its wives; agree when you are being insulted and feign delight when you receive patronizing compliments from heterosexuals; finally, thank them for allowing us a seat at their national table, then bat your eyes and look the other way as the bill comes.

Gay people are fitting themselves into a dysfunctional box in order to win approval

President Obama’s endorsement of marriage rights for same-sex couples gives us a moment to reflect on what lesbian, gay and bisexual people have had to do to win this recognition. We’re all sophisticated enough to know that oppressed minorities don’t just achieve basic rights because the dominant group has an epiphany. On the contrary, LGB people, like others who came before them have to go through (or seem to go through) assimilative transformations in order to become acceptable enough to the heterosexual majority to be considered for equal legal rights.

In its origins, the Gay Liberation movement arose to change society, to expand rigid gender roles, to break down confining social mores of privatized families and to defy the consumerism that accompanies monogamy and nuclear family lifestyle in the United States. It stood for sexual expression based on consensual desires, and community based relationships in tandem with monogamous and non-monogamous couples.

However, the AIDS crisis changed all this. At the same that AIDS made it impossible for America to continue to pretend that homosexuality did not exist, LGB Americans internalized the traumatizing messages of the AIDS crisis. We watched 500,000 Americans die of government indifference and neglect. In a transformation similar to that of post-Holocaust Jews in the United States, LGB people began to assimilate in large numbers. The continued distorted representation of our lives in mainstream arts and entertainment coupled with pervasive familial homophobia, pressured many LGB people into abandoning or perhaps forgetting about the goal of an expanded society. In a sense we were “bullied” into letting the society change us. The bait was that the more we appeared to mirror heterosexual family structure, sexual mores and consumer patterns, the more they would accept us. In this way, instead of changing society, society changed us – and – on the surface- we now have lost a great deal of our specificity and are so recognizable to straight people that even the most powerful heterosexual in the world, Barack Obama is confidently unthreatened enough to endorse equal marriage rights.

What this does not address, however, are the problems inherent in marriage itself. we all know that 50% of heterosexual marriages end in divorce. So, clearly marriage is not working as an institution. Now that gay people are fitting themselves into a dysfunctional box in order to win approval, our futures will surely be as strewn with disappointment, legal battles and failure to conform that heterosexuals endure, even with their constant advocacy by film and television, and the profound privileges given to them by their families. In this way we are living in the gay version of the 1950′s. But the 1960′s are just around the corner. Inevitably these conservatizing trends will again explode into a new sexual revolution, collective living, and a desire for liberatory feminism. I just hope I live long enough to see it.

Unfortunately, queer ladies find nothing more annoying than someone else being the highest of femmes in the room.

As the bar was closing after a recent birthday bender, a fifty-year-old transgender man whom I had never met before offered to take me next door to Dunkin Donuts — his treat. He bought me a kruller, and demanded the scrawny teen behind the counter produce a birthday candle to insert into it. “You deserve the best,” he explained.

You are probably thinking, “what a lovely surprise.” But while it was lovely, it wasn’t a surprise. At least, not for me.

Throughout my queer adult life, I’ve regularly had watered-down well whiskey and bottles of Miller High Life sent to me by transmasculine fellows whom I don’t know. Once, a well-dressed dandy offered me a bus swipe when I was low on change, while on another besotted occasion an OKCupid date paid my part of the cab fare home, even though I threw up out the window a little.

And whenever I ask what I’ve done to deserve such treatment, the donors of these gifts have always said the same thing: my seductive femininity and perky good looks have made their day. In the words of one particularly savant ex-boyfriend, “Girl, your tits are as hard as a fifteen-year-old’s.”

While I’m no Tiffany Amber-Theisson, I’m tall, slim, attractive and, as I’m often told, “one smoking hot piece of ass.” But there are downsides to being pretty — the main one being that other femmes hate me for no other reason than my subversively “conventional” attractiveness.

If you are a femme reading this, I’d hazard that you have already formed your own opinion about me — and it won’t be one of femme solidarity. For while many doors have been opened for me (by chivalrous “old school” butches) as a result of my good looks, just as many have been metaphorically slammed in my NARS-painted face — and usually by those of roughly my own gender.

I am no oppressor and I’m no flirt, but over the years I have been dropped by countless ladykin friends who felt threatened if I was merely in the presence of their masculine-of-center partners. If said husbutches dared to fetch me a cocktail, for instance, a chill would descend on the room.

And it’s not just jealous primary partners who have frozen me out of their lives — femme community organizers seldom remember to invite me to perform at their open mic affairs, and femmes rarely, if ever, contribute to my Kickstarter campaigns.

And, most poignantly of all, only once has any sex worker friend of mine offered to let me be an upsell third in a session with one of her regular clients. Only once.

You would think that we femmes would applaud each other for taking pride in the little things that make up (and make-up) our genders. I work on mine: I insist on cruelty-free lash extensions, I tease my hi-contrast beehive to untold heights, and I shave my legs once a month, even if I don’t feel like it. I only rarely succumb to prescription amphetamines, so I don’t end up with Fergie teeth. Unfortunately, queer ladies find nothing more annoying than someone else being the highest of femmes in the room.

Take last week — while I was at a sex party and about to light my date on fire, I saw a femme who used to live in my building. I waved, and she blatantly snubbed me. This is someone whose housebois have cleaned my toilet on countless occasions, and whom I have invited to countless vegan gluten,-nut-and-nightshade-free potlucks.

I approached a mutual ex and discreetly inquired if I had made a faux-pas. It seems the only crime I have committed is leaving the house without a gimp mask over my head. As our ex pointed out, she is shorter, heavier, older, and less radical than me. She is adamant, he tells me, that something could happen between her current fluid-bonded paramour and me, “were the right circumstances in place.” This, despite the fact that I am currently happily serially monogamized, and don’t date switches.

This isn’t the first time such paranoia has gripped the femmes around me. Once, during my late-mid twenties, I had a roommate with whom I got along famously. We often chatted over a cup of womyn’s moon cycle tea late at night about our frustration with the local dating scene and her personal evolution into a transsensual identity. She confided in me that she was frustrated with the promiscuity of her on-again, off-again lover, whom she described as quite the rascal.

I often dress down in 4-inch heels and a wholesome, albeit areola-baring, minidress.

One day, I walked into the kitchen, and was surprised to find a muscular, steel-eyed genderqueer there, in his binder, nibbling on my cookies — my roommate’s beau. Though I couldn’t remember his name, we immediately recognized each other, and I was flooded with the sensory recollection of sucking his dick in front of like fifteen people only a few weeks before. It seems this wiley broheim had taken the opportunity to get some strange with yours truly while my roommate was out of town at her grandmother’s funeral — though, to be fair, on that particular week, they were “on a break.”

Later, after he confessed our exhibitionistic tryst to her, she began to grow quite cold with me, though he kept coming around. We had undeniable chemistry, and when she inevitably caught us fucking again, she called me unspeakable names, unfriended me on Facebook, and declared her intent to move out, giving me only two weeks’ notice. The nerve!

My therapist says that even feminists often measure each other by their looks and their ability to attract partners. She says that perhaps what other people perceive as my narcissism may be merely a positive outlook on the actualization of my identity.

“People think that just because you may not face some of the same oppressions that they do, that you have a perfect life. That is not true. They may also act hostile toward you — as therapists, we call this ‘relational aggression’; in the African-American ball community, it is called ‘shade.”

She has prescribed that I take more time for self-care.

I certainly find that it is true that the fiercest “shade” I experience comes from femmes in the size-positive circles, perhaps because these lovely ladies feel the sting of butch scarcity the most sharply. Another ex of mine, for instance, a trans man who had dated a few full-figured femmes during his time amongst the lesbians, told me to shrug off the hurtful comments. “When it comes right down to it,” he said, “trans guys need validation from beautiful women. And a pretty straight-looking girl will always win over a fat dyke, every time.” I was appalled at his fatphobia and told him to check his privilege, and then we resumed our cokehead-Sarah-Lawrence-undergrad-heiress and ibanker-American-Psycho-date-rapist role play scenario.

Still, I dread the Sapphic snarkery. “Here she comes. She looks like Ke$ha fucked a donkey and threw up,” was one comment I recently overheard. As a result, I find queer dance parties and performance art pop-ups fraught, and if I can’t wriggle out of them, then I often dress down in 4-inch heels and a wholesome, albeit areola-baring, minidress.

Now that I am in my early early thirties, I welcome the decrease in my queer sexual currency. Perhaps, as I settle into the gravitas of my senior years, and the sun damage and smoker’s lines start to catch up with me, my femme systerhood will start to accept me not for the firmness of my skin, but the content of my character.

Though, maybe that’s not a good thing.