If you were a straight man, I would run to Newbury Street to buy a red dress. I would choose the dress that made me look the softest and most fragile. It would be silk; not shantung, but a thin silk that runs off the body like water. It would be a dress that would speak vulnerability; it would communicate a need for you, no man but you. It would say, “I need shelter. Be the fixed point in my universe, my unchangeable rock, and I will be your light and music.” You, being a straight man, would not resist the feel of silk, for they never do. So when you yielded to your desire to touch me, to tear the dress from me, you would be the fire and I would be the air.

If I were a man, and as tall and strong a man as I am a woman, I would be taller and stronger than you. I would come behind you in your beautiful South End apartment and reach around you, my left arm across your chest, to grasp your right shoulder in my left hand. I would press my chest against your back and kiss the back of your neck while my rough chin grazed your skin. With my right hand I would stroke your hair, your neck, your collarbone, your side (drifting down each rib), your right hip, and the inside of your right thigh. When I finally touched your cock, you would already be hard and trying to turn to me, but I wouldn't let you turn. I would hold you even tighter against me, lick my hand and grasp you again with my wet palm. Only when you cried out for me would I turn you, gently force you onto the floor, and take you in my mouth. You would reach to touch my face, my hair, but I would grab your wrists and hold them while I went down on you. When you arched your back and came, I would shift my grip from your wrists to your hands, knotting my fingers in yours for a moment; then I would stand up, walk over to the couch, lie down in a pin-up pose and grin at you like a cat that just swallowed a canary.

Cruelty compounded, I said after a liter of sangria in Tapeo, that I should meet you now, for whom my heart leaps in recognition, as though I spoke to the other half of my own soul-- only I'm leaving town, and you're gay. Do I win the prize for choosing unattainable men? Come back to Berkeley, Susie the Gynecologist said to me, and I will take you to every girl bar in the East Bay-- you will see how soon you will forget him and Boston, too. Will the girls in the girl bars delight me with their wit and depth? Will they know more words than I do, and the meaning of words in history? Will they possess that peculiar combination of mischief and mildness that reached through my ribcage and seized the core of me before I had time to protect myself, as I certainly would have had I seen it coming? Will they make me feel that I have met my opposite in chirality, my imaginative stereo-isomer? We sat across a coffee-house table in Harvard Square one night, you and I, comparing patterns of sexual attraction, and you said, “We're not so different.” I reached my left hand to clasp your left hand (turning the gesture into a high-five so as not to be too intimate), and for a moment we seemed like two opposite knight's moves on a chess-board, each a reflection of the other around a point in the center of the table. Then why did I call myself a bisexual woman, and you call yourself a gay man? Because as I press my knee between a woman's legs in a Monterey gay bar and hold her against the wall that's shaking with each dance beat, and she makes that sound that takes me to some atavistic place where I want to throw her on the bar and ravage her with pleasure, some part of me still wonders: will I ever feel again the rainbow that opened up inside me with your brotherly kiss?

No, I told you, closing the Copley Plaza bar over excellent scotch, I didn't think people who wanted to have sex change operations just needed counseling instead. On the other hand, I felt they were still bound by stereotypes of femininity and masculinity. I kept Loren Cameron's book Body Alchemy, a collection of photographic portraits of female-to-male transsexuals, right next to the latest issue of Vogue. I liked the juxtaposition, because both represented people who had drastically modified their bodies in pursuit of a highly sexually dimorphic ideal of beauty, so that fashion models and transsexuals had more in common with each other than either did with me. Did I want to be a man? I told you I didn't. I had intermittently until I was twenty, when sex got really great. When I was twenty-three, I heard a lecture in which a man in his late forties exhorted us to try to remember that adolescents were so callow that the most transcendent thing most of them had ever experienced was an orgasm. I looked around surreptitiously to see if the faces of any of my colleagues betrayed what I was thinking: that I had never experienced anything more transcendent than an orgasm, either. Guess what, I told you: at thirty-four, I still hadn't. So, I boasted, no amount of male privilege was ever going to induce me to give up the capacity to enjoy a dozen orgasms in a single morning. Two months later, I was wishing I could borrow my six-foot-four brother's body with which to seduce you. I would love you for two months, or three, and then, poof! I would turn into me again, and say-- if you loved me in that body, why can't you love me in this?

“Bisexuals don't exist,” you said, your arm around me, walking by the Fens. “Everybody has a preference. No one's really fifty-fifty.” Well, if sexual orientation were a bipolar linear continuum, your thesis would be trivially provable. Try this experiment. Buy yourself one of those magnetic poetry kits, and start sticking the words up on your freezer door. Make columns for the different parts of speech. Here's a verb: “ask.”