Passing by Lane Michael Stanley

Los Angeles, California.

Him: Jess, elder millennial from Los Angeles.
Me: millennial, born in San Diego, raised in Maryland, three years on Testosterone. 

Jess takes me on our first date on Valentine’s Day, to a vegan Thai restaurant. We’ve been in love for a year and we can finally be together. He’s starting to come down with the flu but pretending he isn’t so we can hold hands and share soy chicken skewers with peanut sauce. 

We’ve only named our feelings as obstacles, our falling in love a problem in the context of his “open just for sex” marriage, an extremely common arrangement on the gay male hookup apps that generally works until it doesn’t. But now we have permission from his husband to love each other—permission that will soon be revoked—but we don’t know that yet and we’re far too happy now for any worry to feel real. 

I love Jess for his groundedness, his carefulness, the way he expands his comfort zone little by little instead of diving in deep like I’m prone to do. He’s lived his whole life as a gay man in the many versions of Los Angeles, the son of a construction worker in East LA, and now a studio executive. In this space, his space, it would never occur to him to worry.

He finds just the right time to stand, walk over to my side of the table, hold my face in his hands and whisper that he loves me. 

Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Him: Tom, young baby boomer from Tennessee, lived his whole life in the American South.
Me: lost in the blue of his eyes.

Krankie’s has the best vegan hot honey chicken biscuit I’ve ever had, so he’s promised to take me every day of my visit. A biscuit is a difficult task for vegan butter, but the flaky crust and spicy sweetness, washed down with deep chocolatey coffee on a cute patio with a new lover, is simply perfect. 

I interrupt our breakfast for a trip to the restroom. A peck on the cheek had never alarmed a man back when I was a girlfriend, but I’ve learned new scripts from gay men. Tom’s silver hair and classic Tennessee twang remind me that he grew up in a different time and place than me. As I leave the table, I kiss him on the cheek. His body tenses suddenly, his softness turned to stone by my touch.

I think maybe I’ve imagined it.

His body teaches me what he has learned over a lifetime.

Birmingham, Alabama.

Her: my mother, baby boomer, born and raised in southern California, now living in Maryland.
Me: traveling every weekend for the next seven weeks.

Jess is accompanying me to a film festival in Birmingham, the trans film I made with friends in Texas making rounds in the South I hadn’t expected. I call my mom during my commute and tell her about my upcoming trips. 

His body tenses suddenly, his softness turned to stone by my touch.

“Are you ever worried about traveling in places like that?” 

I tell her I feel safe traveling as trans now, because I have the privilege of passing. Passing always happens as something / to someone, but in the general milieu of crowds I have no issues. I slip past like any other guy, the other men in the restroom just assuming I’m taking a shit. But Jess accompanying me does make this trip feel a little different: the safety I feel as a passing trans person doesn’t extend to my intimate relationships with other men. 

“Be careful,” she says. “They don’t have to know you’re a couple.” 

Sometimes hiding is the only survival skill we know to teach each other.  

I tell her that the South has surprised me, that my trips with this little trans movie to North Carolina, Mississippi, and now Birmingham have brought me into community with other queer people at every festival, gays who are living resistance to a dominant red culture, communities of color and queers on the frontlines, and when we write off a region we leave them behind. In Birmingham we find a Black-owned vegan restaurant, a panel on climate justice, rainbow signs saying “All Are Welcome Here” at the gift shop we pop into for a souvenir. 

Still, when Jess decides to come with me, I rebook our Airbnb to a place where we won’t have to interact with the host. 

Maybe I’m being unfair to the woman we would have stayed with, whose only trait listed on her profile is “boy mom.” For all I know, she’s queer herself. 

And for all I know, she isn’t. 

Berkeley, California. 

Him: a disembodied hand.
Me: reasonably settled on the gay hookup apps, curious what offline might look like. 

I’ve been chatting with a guy whose profile name is CJ, but neither of us have a place to host so he suggests we meet at a bathhouse. He’s in San Mateo, which I get scoffed at more than once for referring to as the Bay Area, and I’m crashing on my friend’s floor in the Castro. I’ve never been to a bathhouse, and when I ask if it’s trans-friendly he admits he can’t really know the answer to that as a cis guy, but the Steamworks in Berkeley has a monthly all genders night. He sweetly calls ahead to make sure they will accept trans men any other day of the month. 

My glasses fog immediately inside, but even without them I can feel eyes on me as he gives me a tour, his Oklahoma upbringing clear in his graciousness toward me even in this hypersexual space. The blurry figures of passersby never come into enough focus for me to clock any facial expressions, leaving me to wonder whether anyone reacts to my transness. 

The apps might minimize each of us into a few explicit details, but their blessing is the power to make transness part of the billboard I project to any man who looks at me online. Disclosure politics don’t come into play when my screenname is “subbyftm” with a book emoji, and the app has a feature where I can filter for men who’ve indicated their interest in trans people on their profile. Real life has no such filter, and my transness is less obvious to others by the day. 

We pass men with soft towels wrapped around their waists, a row of open showers, a hot tub that sits below several screens showing hard-core pornography, and, for reasons of gay male culture that I’m just beginning to understand, a weightlifting area. 

There’s a long section of the bathhouse I can only describe as glory hole cubbies. I get in one and my new friend offers his thickness through the nicely cut-out opening in the cubby wall. A stranger’s hand gently swats at me through another opening, this space’s code for invitation. 

Real life has no such filter, and my transness is less obvious to others by the day.

Am I comfortable interacting sexually with a man who doesn’t know I’m trans? I feel a sense of unease, unclear on whether I’m uncomfortable in myself at not being known by a sexual partner, or worried about what someone would do after finding out they had interacted with a trans person unknowingly. (Maybe nothing; maybe something.)

I don’t know how I’m being perceived in this moment–which is an odd concern, because the entire purpose of a gloryhole is not to perceive each other, except as givers and receivers of sexual favors. Still, this space is explicitly for men, and my presence in here implies that I am a man, at least by my own definition and the definition of the guy at the front desk who took my entry fee, but I am the one who will have to deal with the consequences if this stranger has a different definition. 

In the moment, I decide that I don’t owe the potential recipient of a glory hole blowjob any disclosures, but it’s also not what I feel like doing when I’m already quite occupied with the cock I came here with. I ignore the hand and it politely goes away, the etiquette of the space exactly as my host described. 

In the steam room we listen to comically loud slurping sounds, until a burly daddy gets up from his knees and claps hands with whomever he was pleasuring in a manly show of camaraderie and approval. We fill the new silence chatting about the best hiking in San Francisco, our noses filled with eucalyptus and mint, the swiping hand forgotten. 

Somewhere in Arkansas.

Him: Jess, recently separated from his husband, still kind, open, rarely one to complain.
Me: Moving cross-country with cats, strung out from the process, a complainer. 

I’m leaving Los Angeles for a nine-month residency in New Jersey, and Jess is helping me move. My massive cat has shit himself in the backseat so we pull over at a gas station and try to clean him up next to the pumps. 

I am still new to the phenomenon of being two men in love outside the city of Los Angeles, and this place has been chosen only for its proximity to the patch of highway where the smell first reached our nostrils. 

Jess told me once he hasn’t experienced much homophobia. I don’t know anything about growing up in a Mexican family in Pacoima, and I don’t know anything about working at a studio full of people older, whiter, and straighter than me, but I wonder if quieter marks were left on him, even as he got to know every square foot of gay space in his sprawling hometown. He is sheltered in his own way: I wish I could learn this sense of ease from him, but I know it grew a long way from this pit stop, where a few pickup trucks idle around us in the twilight as cicadas sing in the surrounding woods.

Jess balls up a handful of stained paper towels after we declare my little beast dry enough, and kisses me before heading to throw them away.

It’s almost night and I don’t know who else is here at this gas station somewhere in the middle of Arkansas, and so my whole body tenses unconsciously, offering hardness in response.

Maybe he wonders if he imagined it. 

The mountains outside Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Him: Tom, sweet and tall and warm. 
Me: locating the part of my heart that can connect without sarcasm. 

I wish I could learn this sense of ease from him.

After the promised breakfast at Krankie’s he takes me on a driving tour of the fall colors. We talk quietly and cautiously about our dead lovers, my fiance who dropped dead of a heart attack seven years ago, and his partner of eight years who died in the ‘90s. I stop myself from asking if it was AIDS, envision the start of their love in late-eighties Tennessee, find out later his car slipped on black ice in the night, robbed him from everyone he loved. 

We stop every now and then to look out into valleys and take photos on our iPhones. I want a picture together. I like seeing photos of myself with emotionally intimate partners after a couple years of sticking to the gay hookup apps where I’m unlikely to learn their last names. 

At one vista a woman offers to take photos of us, and he stands several feet away from me. The photos are strange, the two of us with our hands in our pockets, smiling in front of the rolling mountains, what we are doing there together completely opaque from the photographs, a cross-generational male outing of some chaste and distant kind. 

This I know I haven’t imagined. 

Black Rock City, Nevada. 

Him: staring. 
Me: my first time at Burning Man, biking through dusty pathways. 

I assume being shirtless outs me, but it turns out most people can’t identify mastectomy scars. I make a little copper necklace at a tent and a man expresses shock that I am trans even as my scars sit freely on my chest. 

I pass so much now that people still easily call me “he” when I am completely nude, the revelation of my cunt just articulating the type of “he” they assume me to be. 

Only one time do I catch someone staring at my scars. I feel his eyes on me from across the path. I keep purposefully not catching his eye, feeling his fixation on me, not sure what he wants, debating whether I should just bike away and find my friends later. 

Finally I can’t help it and I look over at him. 

His top surgery scars poke out from underneath his vest. 

“Hey!” he calls to me. “You going to the transmasc meetup on Thursday?” 

Sequoia National Forest, California. 

Him: bright white farmer’s tan even in the nighttime. 
Me: driving into the rural vastness. 

Jess is assisting me on a shoot in Bakersfield so we can see each other while I’m in residence in Jersey. The hot spring is an hour out of town, but we wrap early and neither of us has ever been to a hot spring so we eat avocado rolls while driving to make it out before sunset. The subject of our tiny documentary shoot, a genderqueer dancer with bright pink hair and matching beard, said some people think night is the best time for hot springs anyway. They encouraged the nudist approach to the springs.

The winding road hugs a rushing river and Jess has never seen a river like this in real life. He’s from one of the biggest cities in the country but he’s traveled very little, our trek cross-country to Jersey doubling the number of states he’d set foot in. 

It’s the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, which we realize a bit too late as the springs are overcrowded. There are two “tubs,” one in its own little area and the other right on the riverside. Usually there are more, but everyone says water levels are high this year. 

We wait by the river, giving the family in the tub a bit of distance and privacy. When we see them getting out, another group is coming down with loud music blaring. We rush to get in, trusting the darkness to cover us as we fling off our shorts and hop into the warm, starlit water. 

We settle in, Jess’ arm around me, looking out over the river. 

They encouraged the nudist approach to the springs.

“Hey. Can I give y’all some advice?” 

We turn to find the father, a tattooed and heavily sunburned white man with thin brown hair down to his shoulders. 

“I see what you’re doing. I get it. And I support it. Every chance I get, I support you guys. But this isn’t cool. There’s kids here, man. You have to give some warning. Jumping in naked? Come on, man. I could be pissed off about it. And I am, a bit. It’s kind of a bad reflection on your community, don’t you think?” 

I freeze. Too aware of our nakedness, the clarity of the water. Jess deescalates. 

“That’s fair. We thought it was dark enough, but that’s fair.” 

“I mean, don’t you think it reflects poorly, on your whole thing? Like I said, I support you, man.” 

“Yeah. We understand.” 

Finally he leaves, satisfied that his advice has been heard.

We turn back to each other in his wake. I think he was mad about two men with their arms around each other. Jess thinks he was mad about the nudity. “Would he have come over to us if we were wearing swim trunks?” Jess asks. 

“Would he have come over to us if we were a straight couple jumping in naked?” 

We have no way of answering these questions. 

Sitting in this river, naked with my love, deep in the woods of a red part of California, it’s hard for me to feel safe. 

Music blares from the group behind us, battling the sounds of the rushing river. 

We sit, and try to breathe, and try to attune. 

Los Angeles, California. 

Him: Gen X gym rat.
Me: moving soon to New Jersey, proving you can still cry all the time on Testosterone. 

I want the muscle bear I’ve been fucking for over a year without learning his job, last name, or interests (other than going to the gym) to aggressively pound me one more time before I move to Jersey, but neither of us can host. I call the local bathhouse to see if the space that is safe for his overt sexuality will let me through the door.

“This is a men’s club.” 

“Right, so I live as male, everyone assumes I’m a man, but my driver’s license says female, so I’m just checking that won’t be an issue.” 

“Hold, please.” 

I had thought my Berkeley-Oklahoma boy was just being cautious.

A new, more hostile voice answers the phone. 

“This is a men’s club.”

I explain again.

“It needs to say male on your driver’s license.” 

“So, just so you know, that’s a pretty problematic policy for trans people – “

“Get your license changed, you can come in.” 

“Getting your license changed is a difficult process, what’s the harm in – “

“We can’t let women in.” 

“I’m not a woman.” 

“We have to define it somehow. How would you define it?” 

We argue and I fall back on how I look like a man, how everyone I meet sees me as a man – which is truly, deeply, not how I would define it, but it’s the argument I find when I’m unexpectedly cornered.

My interlocutor is getting more upset, more angry at me, and so eventually I hang up the phone mid-sentence.

The muscle bear fucks me in the back alley of the leather bar by my house, even though it’s early evening so we’re too visible for his comfort. We have onlookers and one of them finds me on the apps the next day, says we put on a good show. I send him back a kissy face emoji.

Atlanta, Georgia.

Her: TSA agent who clearly doesn’t enjoy her 4am shift.
Me: used to this shit, hoping to catch up quickly to Jess.

She looks skeptically at my ID, back at me, back at my ID. 

The muscle bear fucks me in the back alley of the leather bar by my house.

“Do you have another form of ID?”

I say no, and she goes to find her supervisor. 

I often find myself wishing for a code, and airports in the South are the closest I’ve gotten to one. While I’ve sailed without issue through the airports of Austin, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Newark, Albuquerque, Los Angeles, Burbank, Minneapolis, LaGuardia, and San Francisco with my supposedly-contradictory beard and the little F on my license, I’ve been stopped twice in Charlotte, and now for a second time in Atlanta.

Our experiences traveling in the actual city of Atlanta have been joyous, loud, and queer. Our first trip was for a queer film festival with an afterparty at the Eagle, a sea of naked leathermen unleashed behind the strip mall facade. Our second trip was to support one of Jess’ other partners as he grieved the loss of his adoptive queer mom, her memorial filled with two hundred queers whose lives she’d uplifted and touched. Yesterday we walked through Grant Park hand in hand and received the hand signal for “love” from a mom with a stroller, and a “good morning, fellas” from a couple of guys I hadn’t clocked as gay until that last word left their lips. 

But this morning we’re not in the joyful queer parts of the city of Atlanta: we’re at the end of the hour-long security line, and the agent is telling me to step aside and wait for her supervisor to come inspect my license, and I’m left to stand there and wonder why I’m being escalated to a supervisor at this airport for a second time in three months. She gives me a halfhearted instruction to wait, but hangs onto my ID. 

“I’m transgender,” I tell the agent, hoping this will speed up her process.

“Yeah, I figured, I just didn’t want to…” She trails off. It feels like she wanted to say “embarrass you.” She tells me the issue is that I don’t look like my photo, but this photo has satisfied plenty of agents before her. It was taken eighteen months into starting T, and my round face and button nose are exactly the same as they always have been. Somehow I think the issue is less about the photo, and more about her perceived discrepancy between my beard and that pesky little F.

Jess hovers near me as I wait by her station. The agent sees him and rolls her eyes. “I didn’t tell you to stand there,” she says to him. “Go on through.” He just points at me and she leaves us alone. 

My gratitude for Jess’ quiet presence is more than I can say.

Her supervisor finally arrives. The last time an agent called over her supervisor (which was also at the Atlanta airport), he just told her that was me and I went right through. I hope that this man will bring the end of this ordeal and I can get started taking my large electronics out of my bag, but instead he pulls me out of line. 

“Do you have any other form of ID?” he asks again, my license still in his hand. I say no again. 

I ask him, “Do cis men who grow beards have to change their license photo?”

“I do, yeah,” he responds, and flashes me his beardless ID badge despite his long (and impressive) patch of silver. I don’t think he understands my question: he looks more different from his photo than I do.

My mind races to the potential of my missed flight, the minutes ticking down to boarding, as he asks me for the third time whether I have any other form of ID. He finally believes me that I don’t. He says he can take me through personally with an extra layer of screening, which apparently means agents will individually search all my items after they go through the scanner.

Jess and I watch, constantly checking the time to our flight, as an agent carefully wipes everything in my bag with a tiny cloth to check for residue of explosives: the lining of my shoes, the little stuffed rainbow chicken we bought from a local queer vendor, my tarot cards, my travel vibrator. I wonder how the presence of a beard and a little F have warranted this level of threat detection. 

I wonder how the presence of a beard and a little F have warranted this level of threat detection.

I carry with me a months’ supply of Testosterone. Jess is helping me navigate my healthcare while I’m on my residency in New Jersey, and he’s handed it off to me in this city between our cheap-airline-sized personal items. The agent wipes it with her tiny cloth, almost puts it back in my bag, and then pauses to check with her supervisor. My heart races, imagining that not only could I miss my flight, but I could lose access to the thing that has somehow, for reasons I don’t quite understand, made my body a place I can call home.

This supervisor gives her an easy thumbs up and my heartbeat settles. 

Jess and I make it to the gate, and he sees me off as I head back to Jersey and he returns to Los Angeles. Tears hit my cheeks as I turn away from him, standing behind me, seeing me off. 

Brooklyn, New York. 

Him: Jess, making friends with the space right outside his comfort zone. 
Me: comfortable, exhilarated. 

Jess is singularly great at finding events, vegan restaurants, secret dives and famed attractions. He finds a transmasc sex party at a dungeon in New York City two weeks after I move to Jersey. The event description proclaims it as a party celebrating trans men in a historically gay male space. 

I love public nudity and I love group sex. 

In the past, my only barrier to full enjoyment of these things has been wondering about perceptions of my transness: whether people know, whether people care, whether I care whether they care, whether they will force me to care. 

Here I am free of those concerns. 

This party is half cis men, half mascs with their tits bursting through leather suspenders, fat hairy men with spread-open pussies, T4T foursomes and me in my red lace panties. 

Jess pushes himself by wearing nothing but his jockstrap, exudes a confidence that he doesn’t quite feel yet from his gorgeous, soft body. 

This is a space for exactly, precisely, us. 

We fuck, and go back to our hotel, and fuck more. 

We wake up and explore Brooklyn, hand in hand. 

We fall a little more in love. 

Winston-Salem, North Carolina. 

Him: Tom, letting us back into his meticulously designed apartment. 
Me: full of delicious pizza, wondering if North Carolina is perhaps a secret vegan haven. 

We return from the mountains to his apartment and fall into each other’s arms, enjoying easy intimacy, kissing and cuddling and rarely separating our hands. 

We had found one empty vista where we took a selfie with his arm around me in front of the plunging valley. 

Now his body can relax again, now that we are safely in the quiet of his home. 

His queerness can often be named, but it’s better expressed in privacy. 

A night of softness connects us again, reprieves us from the world outside. 

Sequoia National Forest, California. 

Him: Jess says he could stay in this hot spring forever.
Me: starting to be unhinged by the blaring music, still rattled from the sunburnt father.

We get out of the warm tub, choosing to admire the stars from dry but quiet land. 

As we pass by the other spring we realize the people in it are about to get out. They leave. The group with the music follows shortly after. 

It’s just me and Jess, a hike down the hill from the parking lot, the sounds of the river our only soundtrack, and the warm silty water beckoning us. 

Still my body worries that someone will show up, that they could hurt us in this isolated and wild place and no one would ever know to find them. 

I don’t know if that worry is real. But it lives in my body, criss-crossed in the space below my ribs, twitching just behind my ear. 

I wish sometimes that my safety was mathematical. I wish a receipt of how a stranger was perceiving me, plus knowledge of my region, plus proximity of a gay male lover could equal a clear guideline for behavior that would keep me safe. I can’t eliminate risk, and I can’t even calculate it, but I know the cost of missing moments with my love because I am afraid.

Jess and I strip our clothes and slide into the warmth of the spring. His arms wrap around me and the dust in the water settles between our bodies. 

I wish sometimes that my safety was mathematical.

We look up at the firmament of stars, the most stars I’ve ever seen, filling every inch of the sky, this vast sphere holding us. 

I breathe into him, and I release what I can’t know, and I let him hold me beneath the blanket of the universe. There are no footsteps so for now, at least for now, there is no reason to worry. 

I melt into him, and we melt into the springs, and we become creatures of the forest, and the stars shine down on us. 

And that is all there is.