Conflicted

Conflicted? You’re Not Alone!

By “losangelesadmirer”

Over the past ten years, I have had many conversations, in motel rooms,
bars, and chatrooms, with TV’s, TS’s, and my fellow admirers, about the
phenomenon most often referred to as the “I’m not gay!” syndrome. The
follow-up, of course is: “But I sure do like those drag queens and
trannies!” Someone I met in Vegas a couple months ago, after chatting with
her online, looked at me and said that she thought that I was going to be a
pretty happy person in the not too distant future.

Certainly, I am a much happier person than I was a decade ago. Back then,
most of my encounters with TG hotties were hurried and desperate, taking
place in alleys and cars with street-walking professionals, who ranged from
the sublime and friendly to the terrifyingly demented. The criminalization
of sex work is a remnant of the dark ages, a direct descendant of the Salem
witch trials, and manages to achieve the vengeance of every overweight
fundamentalist housewife who hates the fact that a beautiful tranny in
London can charge $600 an hour. I have a tranny friend here in Los Angeles
who was approached by an older businessman in a bar. He stuffed twelve
single hundred dollar bills down her clothes, one after the other, and then,
when they went to a hotel room, just wanted to worship her equipment.

Ah, yes, the tool below. That which forms the tantalyzingly forbidden
image, combined with the breasts above. The legendary shemales of our time,
stars of the Internet, high-priced escorts, sometimes crazed on drugs, or
maybe it’s just the hormones. We admirers all have our discreetly titled
files of the countless downloaded pics, we look at the online video
excerpts, we rent or buy the tapes and DVD’s and magazines, we give the
girls the hundreds of dollars they ask for a date, after we buy them drinks
at the bars. Are we in denial? Are we closet cases?

Sometimes we can’t get it up. Sometimes they can’t. Once I was with
someone in the Bay Area and when we were done, she said, “You seem like you
are upset about something.” I was, something very personal, unrelated to my
sex life, and she urged me to talk about it. We sat there for an hour after
my paid time had run out, and I went home that night deeply touched, and
having worked out a lot about what had been bothering me. No religion, no
degree, just a caring person.

Here’s what I don’t understand. My closest friends know that I am a
trannychaser, and do not condemn me for it. Neither does a friend whom I
have known since I was in college, who is the epitome of hardcore screaming
stereotypical gay-ness, someone who would never in a million years fantasize
about getting laid by a gorgeous shemale. He has been with countless
flannel-shirt cop-mustache clones, the All-American Tom Selleck type really
gets him going. That whole scene does nothing for me – my fantasy is
totally a woman, except for that one “swinging” feature. The average gay
bar holds no attraction for me. And, the average gay bar, full of bears,
yuppies, or straight-actors, is not always welcoming to TV/TS visitors.

That is one of the strangest aspects of this whole mess. Here is a group of
people who have been discriminated against down through history, but now
they discriminate against another minority. I have talked to a bartender at
a tranny bar about this, who told me how flabbergasted she was when she
first learned about that reality.

A queen on the streets of most cities risks being gay-bashed every night of
her life. That takes guts! I respect their courage. I myself have
colleagues who would feel very uneasy with me if they knew for a fact that I
am a trannychaser. They already sense that I am slightly left of center,
but still like me nonetheless, as long as it is only a vague feeling. But I
could not walk a tranny escort into a hotel where they might see her, unless
I was prepared to trigger the beginning of the end of my working
relationship with these guys. Eventually, I would be ostracized.

A few years ago, you may have heard about a soldier in the Army, who dated a
TG performer in Nashville, and was beaten to death with a baseball bat while
he was asleep in his bunk. There were bizarre complications to the story, I
think the murderer had actually worn panties under his clothing since he was
a teenager, and another guy who egged him on to commit the murder had been,
of all people, the one to first take the victim to the bar where he met his
future girlfiend. And had been making out with another tranny dancer!

I have some theories about all this. I believe that my co-workers would
love to get a blowjob from a gorgeous TG porn star, same as me, but they
cannot mentally allow themselves to admit that. It would violate all that
they believe in about who they are, and who their wives and girlfriends and
parents need to believe they are. If they could get that blowjob in a dark
room, without anyone ever knowing about it, I believe they would.

A friend of mine once asked me to take him to the original Power Exchange
Substation in San Francisco, and I did, with some misgivings about the
possibility of it shorting out some electrodes in his suburbanite brain.
Unfortunately, it did have that effect, and on the way home he despairingly
asked me, “Does this mean I’m a fag, that I’m attracted to these
transsexuals?”

I tried to answer him carefully and honestly. “What it means, I think, is
that our mothers brought us up to associate femininity with things like
perfume, lingerie, big tits and elaborate hairstyles. That is not truly
what actual biological womanhood is about. If you hang out around some
dykes who live out in the country, you see that they let their armpit hair
grow, they are muscular and not self-conscious about it, they are relaxed
having short hair, instead of being lipstick lesbians, and often they are
really good parents to their children. But they don’t look like our
suburbanite mothers, or the movie stars that we were conditioned to
worship.”

He wasn’t convinced. He hated himself for what he felt, and I know quite
well what that’s like. I went on to meet someone here in Los Angeles that
writes for a TG mag, and is actually a therapist in real life. We never
really dated, but have had some great talks. Talking to her, I decided that
I loved real women and TS/TV’s, both, and that my mind was big enough to
encompass all that.

However, all the genetic women of the world do not happen to live inside my
mind! When I was a college kid in the Seventies, it was quite fashionable
to experiment with bisexuality. Piles of people got high, and wound up in
bed with each other, all the time. Then came AIDS. Suddenly, most women I
met did not want to even hear a hint of any possibility that one’s
weinerschnitzel ever encountered another person’s johnson. Straight was
back, with a vengeance.

Aggressive crew cuts instead of rock shags. Working out at the gym instead
of hiking through Third World countries. Pro-business, instead of
countercultural. Wall Steet, baby! Booze, not pot. Coke and speed, not
mushrooms. Ecstasy and the hypnotic strains of techno, rather than a
plaintive folksinger’s voice asking society to change. Younger women told me
how they wanted their men to be type A and dominate them, just a little.
The gentle boy of the past was left out in the cold.

The good news is that a traveller can still walk into a tranny bar pretty
much anywhere on earth, and even if you are not cruising for sex, even if
you are not a buffed out movie star, you can sit down and have a drink,
watch the show and talk to people, and leave feeling pretty good. Because
trannnies and their bartenders don’t want any bullshit. And if you walk in
and show that you have none, the welcome mat rolls right out.

But one of the dangerous things about having a hot time with the first
tranny street hooker that you ever meet is that then you know it is
possible. And despite other downers later in life, you keep looking to
duplicate that first explosive experience. I have never been able to take
straight guys seriously who go to titty bars and spend hundreds of dollars
and never get their dick sucked at the end of it! I am used to Amsterdam,
where a blowjob is still about fifty bucks, and a hundred gets you pretty
much anything.

In many ways, though, I am a big talker, and still spend more time than I
would like to admit in a conflicted state of mind. I asked Jon if I could
write this, since a couple times in the last year I have left a tryst
feeling sad and hopeless. Feeling like I have closed the book on being with
genetic girls, and now I am left in a no-man’s land, older and just tired
instead of wiser, all without ever having found the TG girlfriend of my
dreams. Just going through sex acts compulsively, with no joy.

On another recent occasion, I went to a motel room with five other guys,
three tgirls and a video camera! A good time was had by all, and I drove
home feeling fine. Quixotically, sometimes I am a person who is quite happy
with the choices he’s made in the years since that first streetwalker in a
tight dress and high heels got down on her knees in that parking lot in San
Francisco, after looking me in the eye, smiling, and gently grinding against
me while we first felt each other up, taking the time to make it fun for me,
instead of just a bored transaction.

In the bars I see them all, the guys completely filled with shame, hanging
back in the corners, freaking out the girls by staring at them hopelessly,
and then, at the opposite end of the spectrum, the ones who are confident.
Laughing, dancing, buying drinks, and finally leaving with a spectacular
creature. I’ve been both those guys, when I was in different moods (and had
different amounts of money in my pocket.)

Let’s keep on celebrating those freedoms that we are allowed. And then say
a prayer for all the tgirls in conservative small towns all over the world,
where they cannot safely go out in public, much less party the way that we
can in most of our bigger cities. And, finally, light a candle for all the
tormented admirers, with their overheated minds and a rocket in their pocket
with a mind of its own.

– losangelesadmirer@yahoo.com

Copyright 2002
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