Proud dog

Though I am cis (for want of a better term) and straight (by dint of always having found women attractive, sometimes distractingly so, whereas men seemed off-putting and faintly simian), I've always liked the company under the LGTQIA+ umbrella. At least they have self-actualized somewhat and know how to throw an event, which is not as commonplace with my fellow straights.

Amber was working the Saturday of Poughkeepsie Pride. I would not go alone to this event, or I would not have stayed long. I needed an anchor and excuse to stick around.

Holly would be there as an independent entity rather than a representative of her college. Last Pride, pre-pandemic, she worked their booth with her then-boyfriend Ken, who tried to convince people to get B12 injections. I somehow found the notion of people inserting hypodermics into my arm at a street fair suspect. I repeatedly declined, no matter how jazzed it seemed to make him. (This might have been the placebo effect unless B12 is a significant component of meth.)

Without warning, I will attack you.
In this way, I will keep you vigilant and alert.

I met up with Sarah M., who is, to my knowledge, also cis and straight -- we have not discussed it directly, but she has never indicated anything to the contrary. It might be easier for her if she were not straight. A dating pool of exclusively men has proven to be disappointing. I cannot promise that it would be much improved by tossing a few women-attracted women in the deep end, but at least there would be more of a diversity of disappointing date options on Friday night.

Sarah had never been to a Pride event before. As these go, Poughkeepsie's is not a bad introduction. It skews toward family-friendliness, as long as the kiddos do not scrutinize the crotch zipper on the vinyl Pink Panther. Local politicians hold banners and even supermarkets douse themselves in rainbow wash in hopes of being seen as progressive. (For all I know, they actively support LBGTQIA+ communities. I find it best to be wary and skeptical that the place where I buy groceries puts much thought into their minority customers by July 1st.)

Hail!

As the parade continues down to the festival stalls, The Satanic Temple contingent marches by with a massive rainbow flag emblazoned with the star of Baphomet. This might not play well in the flyover states, but the Satanic Black House is somewhere in Poughkeepsie. (Or was. Some Satanist's charmingly Gothic home was destroyed a few years about, almost certainly as an act of loving Christian arson.) I appreciate them because, in addition to my progress flag and pronoun pins on my hat, I have one of Artetak's candy blue Baphomets. It is a nonbinary icon, after all.

When I find Holly, she wears a knit unicorn hat. I joke about her bravery in advertising that, but she doesn't know what I mean. Once I explain, she decides she has heard worse fates than a horny couple's sex friend.

Unicorn

Holly's dating experiences are no more thrilling than Sarah's, owing to the paucity of decent men her age. The best she can say is that a younger man (as in, thirty, not eighteen) wants to get in her pants, but he thinks she is too old to date. She says that now that she has a cat she loves in her home -- he even plays fetch! -- she is content not having a man. Her last two live-in boyfriends did not instill her with a lot of cheer toward partners. As a testament to this, I tell her that her ex Dan Jurow is getting out of prison in a year, which I know because a couple of his prison pen pals have reached out to me to ask if he was that bad. In letters, he unsurprisingly downplays his crimes and his culpability thereof. I assured them that the judge referred to him as "one depraved individual" for trying to have sex with a fictional middle schooler. All of that is verifiable through new articles. I offered my personal opinion that he is remorseless and opportunistic, backed up by what others have sent to me since he was arrested. If given the possibility, he wouldn't hesitate to do it again. As far as I can tell, his stint in prison did not change his nature. I hope that he will not return to New York. He will have lifelong sex offender monitoring anyway, which should supply some protection, even if it just means that he violates his parole more quickly.

Not that the gay community is without its Jeffery Dahmers and Randy Krafts, but, given her history, I wouldn't blame Holly for leaning toward kitties one way or other.

Death is gay

I poke about a table of binders and packers. One of the women behind the table brightly chirps that these are all free and asks what I am looking for. She scans me, trying to clock my color swatch on the rainbow. If I were a trans man -- and Melanie assumed that I must be before our first date -- I must be doing a moderately passable job.

I ask if they have any small binders. I get the feeling that Amber's is not comfortable. It does not look so to me. She suggests I fill out a sheet with my needs, and she will email me when they get one. I don't think Amber needs one that badly, but it feels awkward not to see this to its conclusion.

Holly needs to talk, and she does not want to be near people -- a difficulty given how concentrated Pride is. She chats about everything in her life that I might have missed since last I saw her, which boils down to her in-progress deck and her ascending the ranks of community college art professorship. "I hired two people," she boasts. "I saw them, interviewed them, hired them, showed them around!"

Seanbaby?

Holly says she is coming out as an atheist. I didn't know that she wasn't. There was perhaps some witchiness to her, but I don't understand how incompatible that is with disbelief in a specific god. I could ask the Satanists, whom I know are nontheistic.

I do not have much about which I could come out of the closet, partly because I am incapable of keeping my mouth shut (or, more precisely, my fingers off keys). Anyway, little of my divulging would be appropriate to this setting.

As we are chatting at a picnic table overlooking the Hudson River, a pretty trans woman with long braids approaches me, asking if my name is Quackenbush. She tells me she remembers me from when I was her substitute teacher over a decade ago. All I can think is that she has gone through changes enough that I can be forgiven for only vaguely recognizing her and not by name (which I still would not have known, and I wouldn't want to have deadnamed her). She mentions that she works at a gay center having an event next Saturday night and hopes I will come. I tell her I have a flyer and might. (I will not. It is too far away and late.)

When she returns to her booth, I wonder aloud if she had been flirting. Given that I am a goofy, forty-one-year-old, cis, straight, white guy, I would find this deeply flattering. I choose to believe it is so, as this is a harmless enough delusion, and it is vanishingly unlikely that she will see this entry and contradict me. She may have merely been overjoyed that I was present, extrapolating what that might imply about my sexuality or gender. For all I know, I became a topic of brief gossip among her former schoolmates, which is also flattering.

Meow?

My younger brother Bryan finds me around this time. I had suggested that he should come to Pride, and I would be his wingman for him. As he is asexual, this is not a ridiculous idea, though it might have been helped had to worn anything to show his sexuality. If ever there was an occasion to flutter his asexual pride flag (I assume these are issued upon declaration of asexuality), it is now. Even a pin would not go unnoticed here, though it might well every other place he will go. (The aces did steal a striking color palette for their flag.)

Bryan only recently decided that he wants a life partner, which he confessed to our mother, who at once told me. I assume he expected this flow of information. My mother asked me if I couldn't find a way to help Bryan meet someone. Specifically, she wondered if Kristina were single and whether I might fix them up. As much as I would love Kristina to be a member of my family, I can imagine few combinations more incompatible and say as much, at the bare minimum because Kristina is allosexual.

My mother was surprised that Bryan wanted this. His last partner- his fiancee for a time with less than a year before the blessed occasions- was also incompatible, and not merely because she was the antithesis of asexual. Bryan doesn't lend himself to easy partnering. He doesn't want anyone broken or dramatic, but this has been nearly the totality of his dating history. At a certain point, one must undertake the self-examination of why this might be. I cannot name a woman whom he has dated who hasn't been wrong for him. I don't know what his "right" would look like, though the online women with whom he chats seem to exist exclusively to be wrong. I do not know where he finds them and assume my life is better in ignorance of exactly how these things happen. They are not potential life partners for anyone outside of a depressing sort of comic novel (think Katherine Dunn). With some of them, I wouldn't want them even knowing my home address.

I offered to help him set up a dating profile on the site that brought Melanie, Daniel, Hannah, and Ingrid into my life. (I am only half sure that half of those people would identify as both cis and straight.) He said he was too busy studying for a test (which he has since passed). He instead showed me a few catfish on a nerd-specific dating site, whom I identified as such. To increase his chance of success, it would be best if he ran his matches by me. Of course, he will not and cannot. Amber wants me to have nothing to do with this search so that my fingerprints are not on its seemingly inevitable disaster, but I consider this sort of matchmaking fun.

As Holly and Sarah have attested, this is not an easy age to be on the dating scene. What Bryan wants -- a fellow asexual copacetic with his messiness, moods, and demanding schedule as a nurse -- would be close to a miracle without a ton of work, personally and socially. He is not going to do this at Poughkeepsie Pride. Even here, the population of ace people can't number above ten. Those with whom Bryan might be compatible could only be expressed with a decimal point and an alarming number of zeros.

Both Holly and Sarah mention that they have looked to Amber and me as exemplars of hope. We found one another and remain fond nearly eleven years in. I point out that I found Amber in her early twenties and helped shape her into what she is now, which they point out sounds like grooming. I faintly defend that Amber shaped me as much, leading me to that all-important self-reflection, therapy, and head meds. We grew in mutual compatibility, though neither one of us were nearly forty-year-old grumpy asexuals finally deciding that they wanted to get serious with someone.

Sarah and Holly should be easier to match, as they are intelligent and fun with steady jobs. The fault is not in themselves, per se, but in the stars -- specifically, both women were present for too many rotations without wishing on the right one. Now, most appealing men are dating or married.

I am sure neither had the idea of meeting Mr. Right at a riverfront full of men indecently lowcut shirts and tasteful drag queens. (Holly knew the Vinyl Panther, so I cannot speak to his eligibility.) If I were single, I might bat my lashes at a queer woman or so, but I could be forgiven. One of my greatest loves is a polyamorous lesbian, and my serious dating history has only one woman who might identify as straight (but I have not spoken to her in decades and can promise nothing). I've heard men joke that they were male lesbians, but I might have the bona fides to pull that off. It is not, however, a claim I am going to say too loudly at the Pride festival.

last watched: The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window
reading: Guns, Germs, and Steel