I watched the room fill with butches in their short hair, their cute, little boy faces, who were dressed in ties and suspenders with pressed white oxfords. They made their way to the front row to slip their dollar bills into the femmes dancing on stage and acted as men might have, without the creep factor that came from a hetero strip club. Some caught my eye until I remembered that they were women. I thought about one of my favorite books on relationships, Intimate Communion, and how the author, David Deida, explained the male-female dynamic in a way that I finally understood. He theorized that relationships needed polarity in order for there to be attraction. He said that since men and women have both a male and female essence, if you have an energy that is more masculine, then you will attract a more feminine partner, and vice versa. So while I was in my natural essence of femininity on this night and almost any night, I would always be attracted to and attract a masculine man. The butch girls that had entered the room were masculine, which is why they caught my eye, but since I was truly only attracted to men, that’s as far as my interest would ever go.
The next woman that came on stage put tea light candles on our table. Toward the end of her act, she shimmied her way over to Poonam and me, and in a high-pitched voice that we could barely hear over thumping music, she asked us to pour the hot candle wax on her breasts. Being the supportive audience member that I was, I obliged, and noticed how Poonam and I went from playful to serious. Neither one of us was turned on by her oohing and aahing as the hot wax dripped down to her pasties, in fact, the act had ruined the moment, so we made our way out of the club to San Francisco’s quintessential gay bar, The Café, for dancing. I watched as butch women checked me out from head to toe, noticing how I rather liked the attention, and stared at other butch women who made out with femme girls. Others stacked themselves in a dance line like sardines in a can, and grinded into each other to get off on the already crowded dance floor. Poonam bumped and grinded her way into other women while I pulled David aside to find out if a scene like this did anything for an asexual.
