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He grinned at me. “People always ask that question right before disaster strikes.”
“Roger might pleasantly surprise you, though.”
“I doubt it.”
“Okay. But I think we should still post some photos to the Instagram account and see what happens. It may catch the eye of a potential investor, or even another designer who might want to partner with you. It doesn’t cost anything to try, so why not?”
“Might as well,” he said, even though he didn’t seem very hopeful. “We don’t have anything to lose.”
Later that afternoon, my friend Emory joined us for lunch. He was carrying two wig forms with a long, brunette wig and an even longer white one. He put them on the table in the entryway, grabbed me in a hug, and exclaimed, “It’s been too long, Riley!”
“That’s because your ‘weekend getaway’ to San Francisco has lasted three months,” I said. “Are you ever going back to Southern California?”
“I’ll have to sooner or later. My dad hasn’t figured out yet that I took a leave of absence from UCLA. Once he does, I’m sure he’ll guilt me into returning to grad school.”
“I forget, what were you studying?”
“I was working on my PhD in engineering.”
When he let go of me, Emory pushed his thick glasses further up the bridge of his nose and flashed me a shy smile. He was a skinny African-American guy of about twenty-five, who most people wrote off as a quiet, introverted geek. But somehow, he also transformed into an absolutely fierce and drop-dead gorgeous drag queen.
As I led him through the living room, I said, “That must mean he doesn’t know you’re performing at a local drag club five nights a week.”
“God no. He doesn’t even know I do drag.” Emory looked around and said, “Um, are we going to talk about the million-dollar apartment?”
“It belongs to a freakishly successful gay couple. You know I could never afford a place like this.”
“You and me both,” he muttered.
We reached the kitchen just as Gabriel pulled an apple pie from the oven, and I said, “Emory Townsend, meet Gabriel Moriarty.”
Emory’s big, brown eyes lit up, and he said, “Oh cool, like the bad guy in the Sherlock Holmes books.” When Gabriel took off his oven mitt and stuck his hand out, Emory shook it vigorously. Then he asked, “Just so I don’t screw it up, what are your pronouns?”
I’d never actually heard anyone ask Gabriel that, but I realized it probably wasn’t uncommon, given the way he dressed. At the moment, he was wearing a long, off-the-shoulder black tunic and leggings, along with a bit of red lipstick. “He and him,” Gabriel said. “Thanks for asking.”
Emory sat on one of the stools at the kitchen island and pushed back the sleeves of his oversized gray sweatshirt as he said, “I’m not so great in social situations. Like, if there’s a way to be awkward, I’ll probably find it. But at some point I realized it was better to ask about pronouns when I was unsure, instead of making assumptions. My first thought was that you were gender fluid and might use they and them, but see, I was wrong about that.”
“I was excited when I first heard the term ‘gender fluid’ a few years ago, because I thought there might finally be a term that fit me,” Gabriel said. “I wanted a better alternative than ‘crossdresser’, because that’s such a catch-all term and tends to confuse more than explain. Eventually though, I realized being gender fluid is much different than what I am. I’m just a guy who feels most comfortable when I’m expressing my feminine side. The closest word that seems to fit is ‘femme’ but even that has more than one connotation.”
“I know what you mean about the word ‘crossdresser’,” Emory said, as I began pulling sandwich ingredients from the refrigerator. “Sometimes people use that term for drag queens. But you choosing to dress a certain way in your day-to-day life, me performing on stage in drag, and men who dress in women’s clothing as a fetish are very different things. It doesn’t make sense to cram all of that under one label.”
“I hope this doesn’t sound ignorant,” I said, as I turned to Gabriel, “but do you really want a label, whether it’s femme or androgynous or anything else?”
“I guess I do sometimes, just because it would be nice to have a concise, easy way to explain myself to people. Not to everyone, obviously. I don’t care what most people think, and not everyone needs or deserves an explanation about why I dress this way,” Gabriel said. “But occasionally, when I’m meeting someone like a new coworker or a friend of a friend and they’re obviously struggling to understand me, it would be nice to say ‘I’m this’ and be done with it. I can tell them the whole truth—that I dress like this because I like it, because it feels comfortable and natural, and because it’s how I want to express myself—but somehow even that just leads to more questions.”
