Manlier and manlier, bicuriouser and bicuriouser.

So tomorrow is eight months on my delicious golden boy serum, and I seem to be doing fairly well with it. Physical changes are continuing to progress, but in a subtler way, perhaps due to my DUI, perhaps simply because it's kind of just more of the same and it's not all as new as it initially was. I'm shaving my sparse stubble basically every day, but it's getting semi-full enough that if I don't shave, I don't look like a total teenage boy, just a sparsely scruffy man. But personally, I like shaving. Beard-inclined types are always telling me something to the effect of, "You want a beard? Take mine! I hate it!" Perhaps it's because I'm such a Russell-come-lately to the facial hair game, but I enjoy it. I've even contemplated getting a straight razor to further my anachronistic foppishness, but it seems a little premature.

In passing, I seem to be now firmly in the passing as (incredibly femme/babyfaced) male mode. The other day as I was unlocking my bike downtown a panhandler asked me, "Excuse me, ma'am...oh, sorry, sir..." which felt good. When I'm showing my ID people have been commenting on how young I look, and a girl at a party thought I was a freshman and seemed a bit shocked to learn my real age. The older convenience store clerks usually say something like, "You'll be glad you're so babyfaced when you get older!" Of course this babyfacedness will probably pass away in the next few years as the T continues to kick in, but I guess I'll relish this while I can.

My reception in queer spaces has been interesting. I was pleased, though, a couple weekends ago when I somehow was lured into doing the gay night bar circuit, that I seemed to be read mostly as male, even if I was wearing blue velvet pants and stilettos. I found myself outside John Henry's with two conventional-gay college boy types who offered me cigarettes as we mutually bemoaned the fag-to-dyke ratio. There was a handful of rather boring twink types who flirted with me, one of whom said I looked like Elijah Wood, which I suppose is true to a degree in this context. At the same time, certain lesbians were up on me on the dance floor, too, though they could have just read me as a fun dance partner.

Some of Ben's Vegas friends came to visit this weekend, and one of them felt particularly (and vocally) frustrated that his gaydar didn't function in Eugene--many of the straight men in our crowd are on the hipster-androgynous side, and the out, or visibly out, queer men are few. Though I don't expect (or necessarily want) a clearly delineated and readily self-evident straight/gay social dynamic, I thought he had a point, and it made me pine slightly for a queerer peer group. For most of my life I've been more or less cool being "the queer (or bi or lez or trans) one" among my friends, and have been of the mind that the non-sex/gender commonalities I share with my friends (scrabble, books, music, beers) are more relevant than the queer ones. But could I maybe have both? Not to complain; things are generally pretty lovely these days. But I can't help but feel, in my recent forays into the Local LGBTQ Community, that this (at least those I've met by and large) isn't my community much more than the comparable straight one is.

And at the same time as I throw myself into, and revel in, being capital F Fabulous, I take a bit of pause. Maybe I do like girls a little bit, and, I've lately realized, despite conventional wisdom, mentioning ex-boyfriends or recent (male) conquests is kind of anti-flirting when it comes to the femaler sex. And yet I'm not exactly comfortable being a straight dude, or being seen as a straight dude--nor, let's be serious, is it really possible.