 and we're live. All right. Welcome everybody. Pretty soon we're gonna start our program, beautiful Gus. So sit back, relax and enjoy yourself. And I do believe that is my cue. So hi everybody. I thank you for coming out tonight and today rather and I'd like to start off with a confession. And if after this confession, you close your window in disgust, I will totally understand. I won't blame you at all. This book, Beautiful Ghosts was my quarantine project. I know, I know, I can go fuck myself. Saying you were productive during quarantine is like Bogdanovich dating Shepard. Nobody wants to hear about it. It just makes people realize they never liked you all that much in the first place. What happened was the North Carolina based McFarland, a leading independent publisher of academic and non-fiction books, published my first book, Ponyville Confidential in 2017. And my second book, the first Star Trek movie in late 2019. By that point, I was already writing my third book, presenting Purse's combata. And in doing so, I found so many parallels in Purse's life to my own. And I related to so many of her struggles and I felt such empathy for her. It made me realize the time had come to tell my own story. I submitted the presenting Purse's combata manuscript in July, 2020. And in August, I pitched Beautiful Ghosts. So remember in September, 2020, when the sky was in San Francisco was orange? Well, that was when McFarland gave me the green light. And not only did it take apocalyptic conditions for me to get a memoir published, McFarland told me it was going to be on their true crime imprint, Exposite, which fair enough because being myself only just started to be decriminalized. My full-time jobs from September, 2020 through March, 2021 was writing this book. And I submitted the manuscript the week before I returned to work full-time as the acting manager of the Petro branch library. What can I tell you? The apocalypse has done wonders for my career. So what I'm gonna read from today, I've decided, you know, there are many arcs in this book and I've decided to read you the Kelly arc, which is not to be confused with the Cali arc. I briefly considered reading the Cali arc and there will be some oblique references to the Cali arc within the Cali arc, but the Cali arc is ultimately a dark arc because Cali abused me while Kelly inspired me. Sometimes you want your arc to be dark, but not too dark. And whilst there are some dark larks in the Kelly arc, I promise you that it is ultimately far less dark than the Cali arc. That is, shall we say, my covenant of the arc. Wait, why does that sound familiar? Never mind. The important thing is that we're here and I'm going to read to you and if you can sort of roll along with this thing here, I'm going to start with an excerpts from, I'm going to start with an excerpt from a story called Baby Doll, Check Your Cheek. I had loved to dance since long before I came out as queer. Neil Young and Crazy Horse did a series of stealth gigs in a Half Moon Bay bar called The Old Princeton Landing in 1996. And while my girlfriend, Tira, and I only made it inside for one show, we stood about six feet away from Neil. So after that, I was fine with listening through the walls. The Old Princeton Landing shows were a social event as much as anything else. We were already friends with many other Neil Young fans, collectively known as the Rusties. And we were closest with an old-school hippie named Burnout and his wife, Janie. I spent many of those 1996 nights pleasantly stoned and dancing in the parking lot, as you do when your favorite musician is rocking out inside and your friends are close by and you're feeling wide open and happy to be alive. But dancing to Neil Young at the Old Princeton Landing had been another life. And the goth scene, the goth scene became my respite in 1999. I was proud to score the email address Cheryl and it is of goth.com. And my favorite of the many clubs was Shrine of Lilith. It was in the basement of a large granite building at the corner of First and Harrison near the Bay Bridge on ramp. Designed by architect William Gladstone Merchant in the streamlined modern style and completed in 1950, the Harrison side of the building had tall front windows and the words Sailors Union of the Pacific carved along the top. That was the building's official name, but it was colloquially referred to as the Maritime Hall for the concert on the main floor. There was often a large crowd on the Harrison side for a maritime show on Friday nights, while the entrance to Shrine was around the corner on First. There was a nondescript glass doorway leading into what looked like a narrow office building grafted onto the Maritime with a series of potholes out of respect for the nautical premise. There was always a small murder of goths hanging out in front on shrine nights and a tall gentleman with long blonde hair shaved on the sides, checked IDs and stamped hands. The music was muffled at street level, but as I descended the stairs, it became louder and clearer, welcoming baby goths Sherilyn like a raccoon eyed Euridice. I seldom recognized a given song, but familiarity was not the point. It was all about the sense of adventure and excitement as I entered this underworld. And as coils, the golden section had predicted, my soul became spin with Azrael's current form as Anodyne, the woman working the coat check. Anodyne's coat check led to the main bar room which featured comfortable booths and more premise-respecting portholes. Some nights I was the first on the dance floor after the doors opened, getting to spread out as I swirled and swooped, and some nights I was the last to leave when the house lights came on. There were some not great nights and there was plenty of heartbreak and disappointment, but the club felt like home. I made friends there who accepted me for the mess that I was, including a pair of young women named Helena and Fred and a suicide girl named Thora. Shrine of Lilth was also the first public place where I felt comfortable using the women's restroom and I never stopped feeling gratitude for that. I also feel an eternal gratitude toward Cog, a goth boy from Bolinas who was the first person to take me shopping for makeup. He also taught me how to apply eyeliner and while Cog's personal makeup style had a 1972 Brian Eno Grace, left up to my own devices, my style was closer to Eastern Bloc brutalism without the human warmth. My raccoon eyes were courtesy of the tar shade of my favorite eyeliner, Revlon's Streetwear. I used the flat end of the tar for my eyes while I often used the frosty end as lipstick because it stayed on well and it completed my corpse fished out of the Hudson look. The one non-goth club I frequented in early 1999 was, yep, you guessed it, Trani Shack, which was Tuesday nights at the stud on Harrison. I usually arrived around 10 p.m. and leaned against the wall next to the stud's pool table under the blue light, both because it was a good place to see and be seen and because blue light is a dead girl's best friend. As I was bathing in the blue one night, I ruminated on the naivete of my fantasy that if I worked twice as hard at proving I was a responsible and self-sufficient grownup, my mother would no longer diminish me as the baby of the family and she would be halfway willing to accept my queerness. Instead, she said she was currently grieving because she considered my coming out as trans to be the equivalent of my death. Hey, at least my makeup was on point. I'd had a rare feeling of getting it right earlier that evening when I untied my hair from the top of my head, which was always the critical moment. Until then it's theoretical, an act of faith that the unrelated seeming elements will come together as a whole and the risk seemed greater because I was going even less subtle by my standards. Lots of shadow around my already sunken eyes and not sparing the white powder. But when I let down my freshly blackened hair and sought framing my face, I thought to myself, this is how I'll look when I'm buried. There it was. The only thing better than my usual goal of corpse fished out of the Hudson had to be both feet in the grave. Because I felt obligated to tend to my mother's feelings despite her refusal to acknowledge mine, I had recently explained at length over email that my being trans, let alone Goth, had nothing to do with her. Going Goth was inevitable ever since my best friend Conk had explained the slimming effect of black clothes when I was 13. That I was trans was nothing my mother could have prevented. It was not her fault. It was not a rebellion against her. It was not a result of her breaking up with my seldom mentioned father or the lack of a strong masculine role model. It was not a phase and it was not a rash, impulsive or otherwise unconsidered decision. None of that mattered. And when I tried to tell her about my life as a young urban professional in the most quotidian terms possible, I was out of the house by 415 a.m. on most mornings, at the gym by 530 for an hour of cardio and at my desk at CNET by 815. Her response was, I don't want to know. But as I now looked to the large mirror on the other side of the studs dimly lit pool room, I felt not the weight of my mother's disapproval but a sense of wonder about the spectral, more feminine than not creature in the reflection. I had died in my mother's heart but at least I had a beautiful ghost. Also present at Trani Shack were the motherload girls, the transgender sex workers who operated out of the rough part of town known as the Tinder loin. They used to center around a bar at the corner of post in Larkin called the motherload which had picked up the slack after the 1991 closure of the Black Rose at Eddie and Jones. I had walked past the motherload a few times after I moved to San Francisco in 1994. And I admired the purple neon sign reading the motherload behind the bar when the curtains were open but I was always too afraid to step inside. The motherload closed a few years later and was replaced by divas down post near Polk in 1998. And I hadn't yet set foot in divas either. The motherload girls would now often congregate near me on these nights at the stud in early 1999 because everyone looked good in blue light, not only dead girls. The main event at Trani Shack was a drag show at midnight and I already found drag shows boring and a teensy bit problematic since their whole reason to exist was for cis men to caricature femininity. So I usually left the stud around 11 45 p.m. and headed a few blocks down Harrison to the cavernous city nights from my second favorite goth club, Roderick's Chamber. It lacked the social aspect of shrine but the music was better than Trani Shack, the dance floor was bigger and best of all, there was no fucking drag show. I was also fond of Sanctuary and Bound which run various Saturdays at the seventh note show club at the corner of Columbus and Lombard and North Beach. And I explored the bondage of go-go at the cat club on full sum and death guilt at the Manhattan Lounge on market. Seeing a faded hand stamp on my wrist from a recent night out always gave me a boost during the day and having multiple hand stamps from multiple clubs was multiple times better. I was also glad I was getting out there, testing my limits, seeing new things, trying to find out what my boundaries were, experiencing what I could experience before the world definitely for sure ended on December 31st, 1999. I was frequently reminded that I had done two very bad and wrong things by coming out as trans and breaking up with my high school girlfriend, Tira, that in doing so, I had fucked everything up and dashed the dreams of many people. None of those sacrifices would have mattered if I just stayed at home and no less important was that I was documenting it all. Thank you. So this is an excerpt now from a story called Leave Your Expectations at the Door. Tira and I still did things together in those bleak early months of 1999, so long as we did them as casual friends. Sometimes it didn't work, like when we saw Jonathan Richmond at the make-out room two weeks after we broke up. The show itself was great. Heavy on songs already knew by heart from his album, I'm so confused. But Tira and I were simmering before Jonathan came on and he must have noticed the fighting couple near the stage as he debuted his new song, Couples Must Fight. When Tira looked at me with burning in her eyes during intermission and said, I want to see you hurt as much as I'm hurting. We went home because your girl had herself a meltdown. I have to sigh now. And sometimes doing things together worked fine. Like when we saw Hull and Marilyn Manson at the Cow Palace in March during their beautiful monsters tour. Hull's celebrity skin and Manson's mechanical animals were already the soundtrack of my second adolescence with R.E.M.'s monster and up doing the rest of the heavy lifting. So Hull and Manson in concert together was the right show at the right time. I thought of Marilyn Manson himself and Hull's frontwoman Courtney Love as something of a best case before and after scenario for my own journey. And it felt appropriate when their tour collapsed in a cloud of bruised ego of egos a few days later after the Cow Palace show because they couldn't get along. Tira and I were accompanied to the show by our friend Howard. He used to work in the music industry and had schlepped Courtney around to instore gigs during her drugger days. Though his beef with her now was as she had sold out, man. And he also considered Manson's mechanical animals song The Speed of Pain too melodically similar to David Bowie's Aladdin Sane. I didn't hear it beyond the phonetic similarities in the title and I thought The Speed of Pain was the better song. Besides, in addition to how much Manson's recurring themes of reconstruction and rebirth resonated with me, I liked how he wore his influences on his sleeve. When he sang The Speed of Pain at the Cow Palace, his outfit was clearly based on the character of Jack Ferry from the opening credits of the recent Todd Haynes film Velvet Goldmine. Manson's previous costume during the concert was inspired by Ferry's outfit while singing 2HB in Goldmine's Death of Glitter concert which was itself inspired by Brian Eno's outfit from the inside of the 1973 Roxy Music Album For Your Pleasure because nobody works in a vacuum and all art is inspired by something that came before it. As it happened, Tira had joined me for Velvet Goldmine at the Red Vic Movie House on Hate the week before the Cow Palace concert. It was Tira's first time seeing Haynes's poetic recreation of the early 1970s glam rock era in London but I had already seen it at the Embarcadero Center Cinema on opening night in November 1998 with a friend who was a huge Roxy Music fan. One of Velvet Goldmine's essential themes would resonate with me in the years to follow. The secret of becoming a star is knowing how to behave like one. I also appreciated how it was structured like Citizen Kane and I was happy to read in Goldmine's companion book that Haynes owned the Kane influence saying he didn't want Goldmine to carry a notion of objective truth or ultimate psychological meaning and that using the Kane structure really allowed me to play with those elements. In addition to being an homage to the greatest film ever made, Velvet Goldmine contains the greatest representation I've ever seen of how it feels to want to get out of the closet but not be able to. Teenager Arthur, Christian Bale is watching glam rock star Brian Slade, Jonathan Rays Meyers in a televised news conference as Arthur's baleful Christian parents glare in disapproval. Slade makes no effort to act butch saying rock and roll is a prostitute. It should be tarted up and that if his fans were to get the wrong idea or that if his fans were to get the idea that he's a blinkin' fruit then it wouldn't be the wrong impression in the slightest. Arthur is then on his feet pointing at the screen and saying, that's me dad, that's me. But he only imagines it. It's only a fantasy because Arthur knows he must never ever admit who he is to his parents. And I had been there more times than I could count. And now skip forward to a later part in the same story, the stuff about how much it sucked to be a closet to trans person in the 70s and 80s. It was not good. Culture was telling me that I did not exist and that if I did exist I was bad and I shouldn't. Okay, here we go. I revealed my non-zero level of interest in cross-dressing to my girlfriend Tira in January 1991 but it quickly became a bad year to be a closeted trans woman thanks to the February release of Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs. An eventual best picture winner which picked up the slack from Brian DePalma's 1980 Dress to Kill by ensuring the public would equate us with serial killers for decades to come. Silence of the Lambs, fuck that goddamn fucking movie. Speaking of such things, I want to know what Neil Jordan's 1992 The Crying Game did not do? Help, The Crying Game did not help. David Cronenberg's 1993 in Butterfly was an improvement since the trans adjacent character Song Lillian had a full inner life, is not a serial killer and is never assaulted by the cis male lead. Song is a writer even, but nobody besides me and Tira saw in Butterfly. So it still didn't help. So the year 1991 started off determined to keep me in the closet, but my biggest velvet gold mine moment also came that year. The talk show Sally Jesse Raphael visited San Francisco in May, a month before I turned 18 and three years before I moved to the city. Raphael was interviewing performers from the Female Impersonator Club, Finocchios. First up was a Dolly Parton and then a Cher which, sure, fine. Later in the episode, there was a Diana Ross and an Anne Margaret, which again, fine. The questions tended to be about their daily lives and the recurring theme was that they weren't gay and didn't want to be women. They were men who happened to do this for a living and that at the end of the day, Female Impersonation was a job like any other and they were 100% male and the all important status quo was maintained. Nothing newer startling to see here drive through. The scale of my universe expanded exponentially in a fraction of a second after Sally Jesse Raphael made this introduction. Oh, and a trigger warning, cis person misgendering a trans person and a cis person suggesting that they have any right to criticize what trans people choose to do with their bodies. So here we go. This Female Impersonator I've ever met, 20-year-old female impersonator and some have said that this impersonator has taken the act too far because he has had breast implants. Welcome Kelly Michaels, Madonna. And there was Kelly Michaels in a long black coat over a black bustier in fishnets flipping around her own blonde hair as she danced down the aisle to Madonna's Express Yourself. Everyone else on stage was wearing a wig and a costume and while Kelly's hair and makeup had surely been leveled up backstage, this was who she was. At the end of the show, the others would take off their dynasty hangover dresses and fake breasts and hip padding and put on their street clothes and merge back into the world as men, but I knew Kelly was already wearing her street clothes. This was who she was, a trashy blonde Southern girl with a Madonna fixation. I wasn't watching the show with my mother, but in a less broken world, I would have pointed at the screen and said, that's me, mom, that's me. Kelly was only two years older than me that was further along and becoming herself than I would get for another decade. And while I had no strong feelings about Madonna, I wanted to be Kelly when I grew up. She was not a female impersonator, a straight man pretending to be a woman to entertain people who find that sort of thing entertaining or a drag queen. I came in pretending to be a woman for comedic value because aren't those gashes just so hilarious? Kelly Michaels was a trans woman and she was as close as I had ever seen to the best possible outcome to my own timeline. Unlike myself, she had been openly queer from a young age and was rejected by her family long before she was on Sally. So Kelly had lived a more difficult life than I could imagine. I tried not to romanticize her suffering, but from where I was sitting, I couldn't argue with the results. Kelly did a lot of porn in the 1990s and her presence gave me a fighting chance at feeling represented. She had a distinct persona in her movies, young and energetic and alive. And every time Kelly was awkward and imperfect, it felt like she was being awkward and imperfect the way I would be awkward and imperfect in that situation. But identifying with Kelly's awkward imperfections also meant I shared in her moments of glory. She tended to be in scenes with cis men because everything in the whole goddamn fucking universe was geared towards cis men in those days, but occasionally Kelly would be paired up with a cis woman. My favorite of her partners was Sharon Kane, who looked like Courtney Love's sister and who also had the large tired eyes of my mainstream cis crush, Susan Sarandon. Just seeing Kelly kissing Sharon was the shiniest thing I could fathom, the best of all possible couplings. I was also inspired by how Kelly did everything under her own name. The professional Madonna impersonator, Kelly Michaels, was the same person as the porn star Kelly Michaels. And she didn't try to hide who she was or what she did, not letting shame or the disapproval of others interfere with her personal branding. It was a form of self-acceptance which I hoped to someday emulate with my own name. A few weeks after Kelly Michaels appeared on Sally Jesse Raphael in May 1991, Fresno, the town I was born and raised in, held its first lesbian gay Freedom Day parade. The Ku Klux Klan protested the parade in full robin cone regalia. You can see them there on the side. And in case you're wondering, the sign that that woman is holding says you're not welcome here. And of course, your is spelled Y-O-U-R because Nazis are never not fucking idiots. Yes, the Ku Klux Klan protested the parade in full robin cone regalia. And some of the nice white Christian clans folk held signs with slogans like, God's answer to queers, AIDS, and why does maggot sound like faggot? While others shouted, long live AIDS and gave Nazi salutes. The clans spokesman Jim Cheney lamented to the Fresno Bee that, we can't hang them or tar and feather them anymore, but we can do other things. All of which confirmed that I could never ever come out as transgender or tell anyone my name was Sheryl and Connolly. So now we are going to leap ahead to 2006, long after I had come out as transgender and told the world my name was Sheryl and Connolly. This is called, Parallelist Night, Their Voices Calling. I parked across from the power exchange around six on the Saturday before Halloween, then walked to the dark room, Halloween 2006, then walked to the dark room for the second to last performance of Jim's adaptation of Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein, which featured Michael M. as the monster and anomaly as Frau Blucher. Though I directed the Twilight Zone Live episode The Midnight Sun and acted in David Stein's episode, The Silence, earlier that year, and I had more fun than humans should be allowed to have in the gong show Live. I hadn't been in any feature plays of the dark room since Zippy the Pinhead in 2004. Jim and Aaron had briefly considered doing a stage version of Brian Forbes' 1975 The Stepford Wives with me and the Catherine Ross role, an idea they dropped when the news of Frank Oz's remake hit, and I understood why they passed me over for roles in Clue and Batman and the Princess Bride, stage productions of which I saw many times and always enjoyed. I knew Jim and Aaron loved me and that I would always be a foundational member of our scrappy little dark room family, but it still hurts to no longer feel like their golden girl. And so far as I ever had been, which I had not. They were currently in pre-production on an adaptation of the funniest American comedy ever, the Mark's Brothers 1933 Duck Soup, and I offered to take on the Zeppo role since there was no reason that non-character couldn't be female. They gently declined my offer. Always a gummo, never a Zeppo. Community theater is not for the meek, y'all. After young Frankenstein, I took Bart to the Porn Palace, the aptly named studio of kink.com. Ryder had given me a DVD of water bondage videos she had made for kink, and they were difficult to watch, but now I knew that seeing someone almost drowned was not my thing. Knowledge is power. The Porn Palace itself was hidden in one of the alleys between Market and Mission and Fifth and Sixth, and the event was a dance party called The Feast of Souls. It felt like the golf clubs had gone to an early 1999. Bound, maybe? Or sanctuary? Despite the Porn Palace's BDSM element, it felt more like sanctuary, and the DJ was kind enough to spin a few Marilyn Manson tunes without me asking. I remember what it felt like going to both sanctuary and bound for the first time, and I missed that sense of wonder and discovery. Could I ever get that feeling back? I had seven years to make up for. Okay, that wasn't fair. Whatever I had or had not done since the first Spad movie night in 2005 was my own responsibility, but the more distance I got from those six years, the less real it all felt. How did I bungle my first true shot at adult freedom to allow myself to be diminished in my own home, to have to negotiate my every frequent movement? Frasier called it abbreviation during those bad early months, and it was that, but after a while, it became the worst possible combination of weakness and pride. I was too proud to acknowledge that after my mother flayed my self-esteem as a punishment for doing the very bad and wrong things of coming out as trans and breaking up with Tyra, my opinion of myself was so low that I allowed an angry biped to step on my tail and punish me for the sins of strangers thousands of miles away. No, no, her moving out here was a great idea, and it's working out like we'd hoped. Everything's going swell. I slash we are happy. It had all been lies, goddamn lies, and false statistics. I could feel a callus developing on my big toe by 1 a.m., so I took my leave of the feast and caught a cab back into the mission. Needing a feast of my own, I went to Taqueria Cancun, which was my favorite Taqueria by virtue of being across the street from the dark room. Cancun was always a spectacle at this time of night when I was the only sober person around, as I was tonight and on most nights. Sorry, just gonna take a drink of wine here. But it was more of a carnival on this pre-Halloween Saturday, full of drunkards whose costumes were in various states of disrepair as the line stretched down the hallway to the restrooms and back again. Though vegetarian by disposition, I had been eating meat for the past year as a part of my decadent spiral, and I decided that if I was gonna eat meat, I was gonna eat all the goddamn meat. I'd already had Cancun's lingua, beef tongue, and cabesa, beef head burrito, but tonight was the night for the Saisos, beef brain. I enjoyed my brain burrito across the street at the dark room. Jim and Erin invited me to stay overnight in the green room, and I was grateful for the offer, but the night's adventures weren't over yet. Walking back to the power exchange wasn't an option since it would have involved hooping it through some neighborhoods which were unpleasant enough and broad daylight, let alone as the bars were being let out on the most drunken night of the night of the year. Being trans and public was always dangerous, but I also knew my accursed build granted me the privilege of being safer than I would be otherwise. I still tried to avoid sketchy areas after the sun went down, so I took the always squalid 49 mission bus, which, like Takaria Cancun, was filled with increasingly disheveled revelers, making it squalor more colorful than usual. I disembarked from the 49, after I disembarked from the 49, I stood at the tangled corner where Otis 12th, South Van Ness, and Mission all converged. The power exchange was a block away to the Southwest on Otis, and the Mel's drive-in scene in George Lucas' 1973 American graffiti had once stood about two blocks south of it on South Van Ness. I've always loved this shot from American graffiti because the movie takes place in Modesto, but if you know, if you recognize it, you can see the industrial wasteland of South Van Ness in the reflection of the windows, and it's just, oh, God, weirdly nostalgic. Mel's was demolished before I moved to San Francisco, but I reckoned that if you removed the buildings between the two spots, you could hit the old Mel's location from the door of the power exchange with a decent potato cannon. It also made me think of Fritz Lieber's 1977 San Francisco horror novel, Our Lady of Darkness. That book's protagonist discovers that their apartment at the corner of Geary and Hyde is the third point in a triangle formed by Sutro Tower and the rock outcropping at the top of Corona Heights. And the dark urban magic of that triangle, Magopolis emanci, to be precise, allows nasty creatures called paramentals to enter our world. Setting aside that it was all made up, who was to say that this much smaller triangle formed by the power exchange, this tangled corner, and the specter of Mel's drive-in didn't also have some of its own dark urban magic? As if to prove my point, I heard a man in the shadows say, hey, cutie, wanna suck my dick? There may not have been the pale brown things waving in distant windows, which Lieber described, but there were paramentals out here after all. This perilous night was the end of daylight savings time, and I arrived at the power exchange as the clocks fell back. A free hour was also the night of the monthly fetish ball in October called the Swallowing Ball, $20 to get in. Having to pay offended my sense of entitlement, but I did it anyway because I was feeling lonely and I wanted to see my friends Al and Robin. The dungeon was busier than ever, packed with new faces enthused by the Halloween spirit. Robert, Robin was her usual sex carny self, trying to lure new fish into the cage to play, and there were a lot more people to try tonight. A cis woman who looked like the actress Genevieve Bourjold had been circling the cage like so many others, ultimately shocked and fascinated. She had never seen such goings on, and she decided to take the leap, agreeing to a mild spanking and flogging by Al on the St. Andrews Cross. An advocate of both consent and sharing, Al asked the woman if it was all right if his friend Sherilyn, hey, that's me, spanked her. The woman said yes, so I spanked her a few times. It was okay, but I was also partying like it was Q3 2003. My deepest, most unspeakable fantasy in Q4 2006 was to share simple, fully clothed warmth and affection with a woman who wanted to be warm and affectionate with me. If Faux Bourjold had wanted to go the full dead ringers with surgical tubing and clamps, I would have been game, but all he wanted was a little human connection. Did I suggest any of this? No, it still felt like too much to ask a stranger, and what's more, this sort of thing wasn't what anyone came to the power exchange, it just wasn't done. Thank you. So this story is called, A Flicker of Light Before the Donning. I parked at the power exchange early in the evening of the first Friday of November, then walked to the Lexington Club to nurse a margarita and write in my notebook. Alexa's CD jukebox included the best of the velvet underground, so I put on Sister Ray, resulting in the jukebox being unplugged before the song ended. I counted that as a successful prank. I next hit the dark room for a 10 p.m. show by the sketch comedy group, Up Hill Both Ways. It was an anniversary show with material I'd first seen at Spanganga in 2003, but I still laughed so much at her when certain, when, I still laughed so much at her when some sketches went so far off the rails that the errors took on a life of their own, which seemed like it was probably a metaphor for something. After getting a lingua burrito from Takaraya King Koon and choking down a Red Bull just to be on the safe side, I walked to the power exchange, again, thinking of Our Lady of Darkness and Magopla Samansi and all that. Also, weren't lay lines a thing? Lines of power from under the earth or some such? Since all supernatural stuff was make-believe, I could make it be whatever I wanted. So I decided that the triangle whose three points were the power exchange and the old location of Mills Drive-In and the tangled corner where Otis 12th, South Venice Mission all converged did generate a magic I could use. It would bring me the miracle I needed. But miracles always required hard work. So as I thanked the bouncer for holding the door open for me, I decided I was going to introduce myself to more people than usual, to people I didn't mean to introduce myself to, to throw my head into the more rings than usual and stop being so, damn, timid. A lesson I couldn't have drilled into my say-so's enough was that good things wouldn't happen unless I took steps to make them happen. And that included proving that I was capable of being a slut, that I was worthy of getting beamed with a measuring cup just for having a hickey. Things would go the way they were supposed to go, but I had to state my intention to the universe somehow. So I introduced myself to the Alpha Twin, known to be a consummate sucker of dick whose breath smelled more and more like semen as the night progressed. The Alpha Twin was a gorgeous transvestite whose long straight blonde wig couldn't have looked less like it grew out of her own scalp, and yet it worked. She was often accompanied by the Beta Twin, whom Robin informed me was the Alpha's cousin. Compared to the Alpha Twin's smiling gregariousness, the Beta Twin was introverted, often trailing a few paces behind. I found them both sexy and their pheromones were delicious, but I got no sense they had any interest in me. For as much as I would have enjoyed making out with either of them, the twins were all about the dicks attached to cis men and kissing a trans woman was beyond their experience. There were a handful of mixes and rotation in the power exchange of sound system, and I often danced in the cage. I got to know Eminem's cleaning out my closet well, the song's anger feeling equal parts cautionary, equal parts cathartic and cautionary, and heaven knew I could have used more snare in my headphones. I had recently given Robin a disc of coffee club music, which she was going to give to the people in charge of these things, though it wasn't in rotation yet. After dancing to purple rain on this night, I jotted something down in my notebook. Observing this, Al said, chapter 87, dancing to Prince. Maybe. Al and I were playing on the cross later that night when I saw a redheaded trans woman walk past the cage. Though my natural inclination would be in flogged, spanked, or otherwise roughly stimulated, was to close my eyes and zone out. A valuable skill I developed when I began electrolysis the previous decade. I kept my eyes open now. The scene itself was almost incidental. I was enjoying myself, hooray for endorphins and all, but I was determined to not lose track of this most toothsome redhead. Everything was consensual with Al, and I could have been decuffed and out of the cage in 15 seconds flat, but I was enjoying myself and not quite ready to stop. I was sure she would come back this way, and she did. The redhead glanced in my direction as she walked by and, good heavens, how had I not noticed she was wearing glasses the first time around? I made four-eyed contact and smiled. She smiled back, which was a start, and she stopped to talk to someone before moving beyond my next turn radius. We made eye slash smile contact again, and I gestured for her to come inside the cage. She nodded and walked in. So far, so good. I hoped she'd come up to me at the cross because, like a new convert wanting to spread the good news, I needed to tell her that she was the hottest thing on two legs ever seen in this room. Instead, she stood behind the long table and watched. I motioned for her to come closer, but she shook her head. Fair enough, and I glanced back often to reestablish eye contact. Again, I could have ended the scene at any time, but I was existing in a moment. I was feeling a strong attraction to a stranger as I was being flogged and spanked and rushing on in a dorphins and adrenaline. An alchemy was at work, a combination of elements combining and altering, a rare moment of feeling after a long period of post-rider numbness, and I wanted to experience it. Besides, the redhead had come this far, right? And then she wasn't at the table anymore because she was at the gate talking to a tourist, and, oh, no, no, no, no, no. Picking up on my kitty needs to go outside right now, vibe! Al-Lingden asked if I wanted to pursue the young lady. As I started to undo the cuffs, I agreed, I answered the affirmative. Yes, yes, I wanted to pursue the young lady. I wanted to pursue her and I wanted to, well, the only word for it was court. I wanted to court her. I walked over to the young lady and, taking great pleasure in ignoring the tourist, I extended my hand and said, hello, my name is Sherilyn. Her name was Soma Red, and we got right into getting to know each other, figuring out to what extent we were on the same page and never skimping on the mutual, you're so cute, gushiness. The 23-year-old Soma was born a few days shy of my own 10th birthday in 1983, and Soma, I guess, to my age is 27. When I was growing up, people always thought I was younger, people always thought I was older than I was. My abnormal height had a lot to do with it, but I also didn't like being a child, so I tried not to behave like one. But my apparent age had dropped by an average of five years since I began transitioning, which goes to show what a difference it makes to have a body that isn't completely at odds with your soul. Since Soma and I were a pair of women engaged in a conversation about ourselves, and thus we're passing the Beckdell test, a cis man took that as his cue to enter the cage and insert himself into the scene. He wanted to know how to get a woman to fuck him with a dildo, and though he would have been thrilled if Soma or I had strapped on on and had Adam right then and there, he was not propositioning us. Instead, he seemed desperate for advice. Where should he go? Who should he ask? How can he tell? What should he say? As we talked to him, I put a hand on Soma's thigh and another around the waist, which he'd informed me had been surgically feminized. Soma returned to the gesture and I moved in a little closer. Perhaps seeing us cuddling led to a moment of clarity since the man asked if he was interrupting. Soma thanked him for asking and confirmed that he was indeed interrupting. By Soma's math, we had another hour of talking to do before we slept together. Oh, shoot, the time. What time was it now? I pulled my phone out of my boot. Almost half past three. I'd have to leave soon, so Soma and I turned our attention to each other and made do with what little time we had left. Kissing her felt like a revelation, an undiscovered country, and when we came up for air after a few minutes, she said, Sherilyn, do you realize you're hotter than like nine-tenths of the other women here? I replied, I was thinking the same thing about you and I stopped myself before I could add differences that it's true in your case because this was no time to be self-deprecating. Soma and I each felt like we'd hit the jackpot. The equivalence principle meant we were both right. And as I've nuzzled Soma's cheek, I thought to myself, you are real. You are happening and dove back in. I gave Soma a ride back to her apartment, the Indus River Valley. She invited me inside, but the realities of city life got in the way. I couldn't find a parking spot. So we promised each other we would pick up, pick up where we left off as soon as we could. Thank you. So that is the end of the slide show. So I'm gonna be full-screening it from here on out. But what I would like to say is that as the story continues, I highly recommend that you close your eyes and get comfortable as I read. And if you find your hands starting to wander to parts of your body that make you feel good, well, nothing would make me happier. I'm gonna start off with an excerpt from a story called Two Semi-Metallic Human Beings from when Soma and I had been dating for about two weeks. I developed spectacular bruise on each thigh by the next time I saw Soma red, two dark purple SDS nebula. I brought her to the Black Lake District to watch Cronenburg's Videodrome, after which we had sex as one must after watching Videodrome. And I gave Soma a messier object to match my own nebula, a galactic cluster which would have fascinated Fritz Zwicky no less than the one in Koma Baraniches. As we lay in my bed at 1.15 a.m., Soma coming down from the mini torture told her that one of these times of the power exchange, I was gonna follow her, do what she did, see what happens, dive in. Soma laughed and then leaned in and whispered, "'Cherylen, you don't like Dick?" I reached down between her legs and said, "'That's not entirely true.'" As Soma gasped and squirmed, I clarified that the cis men most Dicks were attached to was the problem. And if I could get past that achiness, maybe I could be like her. Climbing on top of me, Soma's large aftermarket breasts eclipsing my own shy but proudly homegrown pair. She said, "'Maybe, but what you need right now are cookies and donuts and I need to make them for you.'" So we got out of bed, much to the annoyance of my cat Perdita, who had just concluded that it was safe to join us. Soma and I made it to the Safeway on Noriega before it closed at 2 a.m. and acquired the appropriate ingredients for cookies and donuts. They were delicious as was the fried toast and egg concoction Soma made us for breakfast after we managed to sleep for a few hours. Dogs love sleeping. It's a fact. Bad moving night was still finding its identity after a year and a half. And we began a midweek spinoff called Bad Porn Night. I was on mic that Wednesday to heckle the Mitchell Brothers in 1972 behind the green door starring rabbits Maryland chambers, feeling proud to have seen the green door in real life. I'd also just had my roots bleached for the first time since July and after behind the green door was over, someone complimented me on my blonde wig. I yanked at my hair to assure them that it was all mine, please, Kay, thanks, bye. But this sort of thing was why I'd gotten into the habit of waiting four months to get my hair reblaundered. Strangers tended to assume that I was wearing a wig if I didn't have visible roots and they felt free to inform me that they knew I was wearing a wig, nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Soma ventured out to Naked Sword to have lunch with me a few times that week and I was pleasantly surprised the first time she took my hand in hers as we walked down the street. We were already in the habit of kissing hello and goodbye and for whatever reason, whether we were in public or private, but this most basic gesture of affection made me realize I was getting through to something in her. Maybe it was because I sat still for the SDS torture and everything else before and after that but that act felt significant. Since Soma was newish in town and in between jobs, I did what I could to help her find employment. She was open to exploring sex work as a short-term solution but she had never been to Divas, wasn't familiar with the Tinder line and was nervous about getting arrested. I did what networking I could for her and while Soma was all about sucking anonymous dicks, she found the idea of kissing the men attached to them to be gross, making what was known as the girlfriend experience something she would charge way extra for. She seemed genuinely touched when I told her she would be great at the girlfriend experience because I was experiencing it with her and it was great. We were falling for each other and it was improbable for many reasons, not the least of which being that I was a cat and Soma was a dog. Soma was as proud of being a dog as I was proud of being a cat and I often called her puppy while she called me mommy or lover. One night we were cuddling in Soma's bed at the Indus River Valley and I was telling her about a recent date I went on with Storm, a professional dominatrix who was a regular at the power exchange. Storm had insisted at first that I pay for everything since she was the lady I was taking out and I told Storm that as far as I was concerned, I was not taking her out. We were to him in going out together and I rejected the premise that it was my obligation to pay for her. Storm shrugged and dropped the issue. While we were in bed at the Indus River Valley, Soma sat up a little. You know one of the things I really like about you, lover? I replied, ooh, I know this one. You like my peroxide blonde hair. She grabbed a handful of that hair and said, I like that you don't put up with shit. Soma had complimented me many times before, usually about my hotness or how good I was getting at sucking her off but this one cut me to my core. I didn't feel like I deserved it at all. I just said, I'm getting better at it, I think. Soma said, I mean it, mommy, so many girls, especially tea girls like us will tolerate anything but you're so confident and capable. It's hot. I replied, thanks, pup. My role models have always been tough women like my first girlfriend, Tira. And I try, but sometimes I fail and I've been trying to figure out lately why I let what happened happen. Soma hugged me. You mean with yeah, per Cali all those years. Soma said, look at you now though. People grow up, it's rad. I replied, thank you, my little skank burger. Soma laughed at my little skank burger and as I wrote down our conversation in my notebook, we discussed our favorite filthy phrases. Though I hated the word cock and refused to use it and swore to never use it in a book outside of a linguistic discussion, I liked cock socket because of the hard consonants in the internal rhyme. While Soma had quite enjoyed it when porn star Taryn Thomas referred to another woman in a snowballing movie as a cum reservoir. Soma had been called a cum dumpster a few times. Indeed, Soma was proud of having been called every disparaging term there was, but that one didn't work at all. We both knew from experience that it was sexy as hell to go the full Sid Nancy and make out against a dumpster but there was nothing sexy about dumpsters themselves. And I thought to myself, Soma's right, it's rad to be a grownup. So now skipping ahead to December, 2006. This is an excerpt from a story called some semen is saltier than others. Healing board after her world of Warcraft subscription expired Soma organized a bukkake scene via Craigslist. I thought they had a nice symmetry with Pamela Holmes book, The Toaster Broke so we're getting married. One small thing can lead to the biggest thing can lead to the biggest thing of all and Soma invited me to be there to watch. The timing didn't work out so I settled for knowing the address and room number so I'd have a last known location if she went missing and I asked her to please keep me posted in general. While Soma was doing her thing at the roadway in at Eddie and Franklin, I ended up at the power exchange the same night as a group of traditionalists from the Citadel made their monthly visit. In my experience from being around them on a few occasions at the Citadel which was considered the respectable sex club for respectable sex people the Trads considered the power exchange to be a blight. Also in my experience from being around them on a few occasions at the Citadel the Trads were no damn fun. Sex and kink were serious business to them with no place for smiling and laughing. This resulted in me and Al smiling and laughing and making silly jokes and loud voices just to get dirty looks from the Trads. Tourists being loud and raucous at the power exchange were dealt with swiftly by the staff and there was zero tolerance for disrespect but locals like us were given more leeway and it may have helped that we were trolling known meanies. As though Al and I weren't making enough noise my cell phone rang from inside my boot. It was Soma informing me that Bukakecon 2006 was not the success she'd hoped for. Though she got many responses to her Craigslist dad most of the guys couldn't get past the front desk blockade a large gay man who was unhappy about the depravity happening under his roof. Maybe because it was a woman doing the dick sucking. As a result, Soma only sucked about 10 dicks a couple dozen short of her goal. Still it was good to have goals and I was proud of her for pursuing them. A few nights later we were bundled up in her bed at the Indus River Valley. Soma playing elite beat agents on her Nintendo DS while I wrote in my notebook. I told Soma how after I'd gone off the phone with her the night of Bukakecon 2006 I'd spent a few hours with a cis woman named Zuki in the undersea room. As Zuki and I made out we were surrounded by men who were constantly groping us which respected the rooms oceanic premise by feeling like tentacles as though Zuki and I were in a hint a porn. Soma appreciated that imagery and she told me about one of her recent flacial marathons not Bukakecon 2006 but a regular night of the power exchange. As the next man in line put his dick in her face Soma saw his shirt and almost laughed but she had a job to do so Soma went right to work though she didn't have to work hard because he pretty much came up to me and blew a massive load in my face just massive. It was only after the massive load had been blown in Soma's face that she told him she loved his flux capacitor shirt and the man replied this is what makes time travel possible. Soma was finally able to laugh and I joined her. I helped Soma get an intake appointment at the Waddell Clinic the city run department which I had city run department through which I had managed to maintain an estrogen and spiral nalactone prescription during my own less employed years. I also helped Soma get a barista job at a coffee house near the Indus River Valley and I spent some days writing there while she was working her shift. She liked my writing and she said that when people asked her about me she let off with Sherilyn as a writer. One day while I was writing at Soma's coffee house I ruminated on how glad I was that we were each responsible for our own lives and that we both had a work ethic and while we both just wanted to have fun we always waited until the working day was oh for fuck's sake, not that song again but at least now I was on its good side. When we arrived to the power exchange that evening Soma went off to do her own thing and I went off to do mine which in this case was hanging out with Arthor upstairs and watching a member of the cleaning crew do their thing. Arthor told me the entire staff was fastidious including himself because the health inspector dropped in every few weeks. Throughout the three large floors which received regular usage the inspector had never found more than a dozen errant condoms out of the hundreds which were used. I'd seen the floors getting mopped and surfaces sprayed down on a nightly basis which went against the gospel preached by many of the club's most ardent critics. I also knew those critics could accompany the health inspector and see all the past bills of health but they would still insist that the power exchange was a squalid pit where blood transmitted pathogens evolved into airborne parasites which spread a combination of aphrodisiac and venereal disease and with teeth probably. Soma, Soma was getting throat fucked in the blue room around 3 a.m. And when she was finished, she waved me over. Her glasses were off and in the blue light I could see her makeup had smudged and run cut by multiple streams. We cuddled and made out the bed a swamp of wet spots of lube and spooge and sweat and other fluids which only Martin Landau's forensics team from the already canceled show the evidence could identify. The hushed conspiratorial tone she did so well. Soma asked, isn't this hot mommy? I groomed her face and paws, licked them clean. And Soma said, you're a dirty kitty. I kissed her, hugged her tight and thought to myself, Peacock gets the belt. At any given time, at least two men would be watching over the low wall and a third would be in the room with us sitting on the chair next to the bed. Soma always told them that she was spent. She simply couldn't suck any more dicks tonight. I noticed that her dick estimate kept getting higher. She told the first guy that she'd already sucked 11 dicks tonight. The next guy that she'd sucked 12 and then 13 and 14 and capping out around 18. I decided that it should be a prime number and furthermore that prime number should be 47. This led into a debate about whether 47 was a prime number. We were pretty sure that it was, but on this fluid trinched bed at half past three in the morning, our math brains weren't up for the task. We asked every man who entered the blue room if 47 was a prime number. And they all ignored the question, instead trying to talk Soma into sucking their dick. Soma had put her glasses back on, so I kept mine on in a show of solidarity. And if we were wearing braces, you could have put us on the platform in the Green Door show, and the O'Farrell would have a line around the block during the Fleet Week, while North Beach would be a ghost town. Some of the songs from the Mixed CD I gave Robin had made it into the Power Exchanges rotation. Robin herself had fallen in love with Bygog 20's The Bog. And I now felt an extra charge of giddiness when Madonna's hung up SDP Extended Dub started playing as I cuddled with Soma. The song still took me back to descending the Maritime Hall stairs down to Shrine of Lulith. And I now wished I could pull a Prince of Darkness and use 1999 Sheridan's brain's electrical system as a receiver for a broadcast of this moment of tenderness and personal connection in the year 2006. Not for the purpose of causality violation, but to give the poor Raccoon-Ide Schmuck a glimmer of hope. So she would know that as her self-esteem was getting flayed that it would grow back stronger than ever and she would discover happiness she hadn't thought possible. But the transmitter in my consumer grade FM radio equipped flip phone was not strong enough to reach her as a dream, let alone her conscious state of awareness. So 1999 Sheridan would have to stumble through the darkness on her own. She would have to go forward and crash and burn and get back up and go forward again and crash and burn and go forward again and get back up and crash and burn and go forward again, however long it took. When an angry biped started stepping on her tail at the end of the year, she would have to live through that too. The men watching 2006 Sheridan and Soma in the blue room ignored me. They knew Soma was the virtuoso Dick Sucker and I was not. And I was pretty sure that would always be the case though there was a rather tasty piece of well-dressed Euro trash kept going on about how cute we were and how he wanted us as a package deal. It was pleasant enough that I was tempted to volunteer to make him the first cis male Dick I sucked. But to do so would have meant detaching myself from Soma and I wasn't ready to do that. Cuddling with the puppy felt like my purpose to be the mommy slash lover who gave her unconditional warmth and support and pride after whatever sleazy thing she had just done, making sure she never felt abandoned or disregarded like she was a bad person who did a bad thing just by being herself. Well, I'm going to skip forward to February 2007 and this is an excerpt from a story called A Universe Gone Quickly. Dancing. I was pretty sure Soma and I had just broken up not that she knew it yet and I needed to go dancing. All I knew for sure was that I was angry and frustrated with a self-righteous Susson of betrayal thrown in for good measure and I needed to dance it away. I made myself up and put on my most reliable uniform of shiny black PVC pants and a black shimmy so my formula X jacket, all while fighting the temptation to stay home where it was warm and safe and uncomplicated. Sooner rather than later, I found myself at Divas. I first walked upstairs to the fourth floor lounge which was decorated more like a traditional bar complete with a pool table with one of those faux stained glass lamps hanging overhead. There was karaoke on Sunday nights but on this Friday night there were about a half dozen Sismon and no women of any stripe. This was a common ratio downstairs on slow weekends but it felt creepy on a busy weekend night. Excuse me, I considered channeling Soma, perch on a bar stool and be flirty and coquettish, have a man buy me a drink and maybe I'll get a little drunk and loosen up and I went downstairs to our revolution ballroom. Glory, glory, hallelujah, omnima Shavaia. And I was relaxing between tours of dancing duty when a familiar looking blonde walked by and went into the restroom. Is that Lila? Nah, but it was a face I knew and I was intrigued. I stood and edged a little closer to the restroom. Someone else looked, someone else went in and I peeked through as the door was closing. Oh, well, no wonder. She looked just like, but nah, nah, couldn't be. To the best of my knowledge, she wasn't alive and if she was alive, it was unlikely she was currently getting made up in the third floor restroom divas. But still, when the mystery blonde came back out, I asked, excuse me, are you Kelly Michaels? The rumors of her death had been greatly exaggerated for it was indeed Kelly Michaels and I geeked out all over her. Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, I'm a huge fan from way back and I'm just so super thrilled to meet you and this means so much and can I buy you a drink? Despite my babbling like an adrenalized mouse keteer, Kelly understood me. She ordered a white wine and as I got the money out of my wallet, I realized my hands were shaking. I said, I'm sorry, I'm just having a total fan girl moment. Kelly laughed and said, yeah, it's okay, I don't mind it all. Say me and some friends are going to be end up in a little while. You wanna come with us? The end up at 6th and Harrison was one of the few clubs in town which stayed open after 2 a.m. Hence it was where people tended to end up. I had chilled in the outdoor courtyard on the few Sunday mornings myself and it was a great place to enjoy a daytime ecstasy buzz. Presently I wanted to go squee the way you do when your hero invites you to join their entourage after knowing you exist for all of 60 seconds. Instead I ran to myself and said, yeah, sure, yeah, no, that sounds like fun. Kelly took a drink of wine, this one's for you Kelly. Then said, great, but first wanna dance? Madonna's Vogue soon started playing because the DJ knew what was up as 33 year old Sherilyn did with 17 year old Sherilyn and watching Sally Jessie Raphael would have considered an impossible dream, more impossible even than pointing to the television saying, that's me, that's me mom. As we danced, I turned back into a mirror gazer so I could burn this moment into my retinal memory because there they were across the dimly lit room dancing in time with us. The beautiful ghosts of Kelly Michaels and Sherilyn Connolly. When we went back downstairs, I discovered Kelly had been around all along and I was just never at divas at the right moment. And she had a maternal relationship with the mother load girls. She checked in with each one and made sure they were doing all right and I could tell most of them looked up to her. I didn't get a clear look at Kelly until we were outside under the street lights and for someone who had had as rough a life as hers, she was holding up quite well. Her eyes had a translucent ballooness which the standard definition video had always seen her on hinted at but couldn't do justice to. And they were sparkly tonight because she was tweaking. Kelly said as much herself, then asked, you get high? I replied, yes, which was not a lie. Bouncing Kelly asked, meth? I said, no, no, not that, but just about anything else. Which was a lie, but you know, since I would never do bug powder or crack having seen the effects of both in person, but what was I going to tell Kelly? That I'd worked at Naked Sword for almost two years and I was starting to get curious about cocaine and I'd gone to gay porn industry parties where people were doing rails, but nobody invited me inside to join them and I was starting to take it personally. It was all true, but I didn't want to expose how much of a dilettante I was. That I was forever the undergraduate film student in the graduate level writing group. Kelly said the end-up expedition would happen when she tracked down her roommate, Violet. She appeared a few minutes later, though the end-up expedition did not happen upon her arrival as predicted. I had no idea where the evening would go, only that however we got there, I would not be driving. My neon was parked a few blocks to the west, which by Tinder lane standards was safer than a few blocks to the east. And since it wasn't at risk of being ticketed or towed until Monday, I decided not to mention I was vehicular, lest I have to find parking deeper into San Francisco's club land. Instead of going to the end-up, which I was sure was going to happen sooner rather than later, we walked to the circuit as Kelly turned the occasional trick in and out of the car in about 10 minutes. As usual for around closing time, the streets were packed with slow driving men, checking out the mother-load girls. And me, I'm here too. Don't forget Kelly's needy little sister. All while they were seeking out that nightcap blow job. Some of the hardier tricks were on foot and Violet was on the clock in vigilance saying, wanna date? To every passing car or pedestrian, even if they were too far away to hear her. Some programming is hardwired. She was a bit more reactive when we rounded the corner onto Sutter and saw one of her colleagues getting harassed. Violet handed me her purse and rushed off to help the other woman and being nobody's hero, kept a safe distance until the situation was resolved. Kelly was a bit further up, talking to a well-dressed pleasant-looking gay man across from the R bar. He offered to take us to his place in North Beach to do something. That part of the plan was vague but I got the impression drugs would be involved. Sure, I was down for bearing sober witness to a groovy North Beach drug party. He soon drifted away and before long Kelly disappeared back among the wraiths and strays of San Francisco whence she came. Well, fooey. By a quarter to three, it was just me and Violet. I liked Violet well enough but Kelly and I were supposed to be hanging out and we were gonna have adventures and I didn't know what would have happened if we'd gone to the end up or to the groovy North Beach drug party but the unexpectedness was the point. And now nothing. The bombers had long since left torches and the streets were empty of fire. I was pouting to myself about impermanence when a man walked up to me and said, "'Tell her not to!" Violet exposit that she was trying to get a lift to the power exchange but this man was not having it insisting it was a dangerous and unsafe place. I'd heard a lot of people talk a lot of shit about it over the years more so in recent months since I've become a regular but this was the best yet. Dude was telling a sex worker that the power exchange was more dangerous than getting into a stranger's car in the middle of the night. Several mother-loved girls had been found murdered in recent years and it was sometimes followed by candlelight vigils and speeches by respectable queers which was the only time the wider community pretended to care. Those respectable queers made a far bigger more media friendly fuss about Gwinniraho's murder because she was young and photogenic and blameless but because the mother-loved girls tended to be immigrant women of color applying a disreputable trade, their murders were forgotten by the time the candles went out. My friend Gwindolin Smith's Transgender Day of Remembrance had been doing good work to raise awareness about the fact that our people got murdered on a regular basis and that our murderers were often to not got away with it but in San Francisco it's the most progressive in the mid 2000s. Nobody in the power structure gave a damn about a dead immigrant hooker with a dick and don't kid yourself things aren't that much better now in San Francisco. I offered Violet a lift to the power exchange. She accepted and after we arrived she went inside, we went inside rather and Violet continued on her own timeline while I stopped at Checkpoint Charlie. Art Hor asked if I'd seen so much tonight and I said I hadn't, not mentioning that I was pretty sure I had broken up with her early in the evening. I also neglected to mention that detailed Robin later when she asked about Soma. It wasn't something I felt like announcing. It wasn't something since I hadn't officially broken up with her not in so many words. All Soma knew was that I was miffed at her. Was I miffed at her though? Yes, no, Sorda? It was hitting me from all directions as it so often did. I knew Soma would never ask me to be exclusive but us having feelings for each other was scary too. I was also terrified that Soma was right, that I was trying to do to her what an angry biped had once done to me, that whatever else domestic abuse may be it is also a cycle. Everything ended and sometimes it was for the best if it ended sooner rather than later. However, that is not the end of this reading. I am now going to skip forward once more. This last part is an excerpt from the epilogue. It's called Under the Zodiacal Light. December 31st, 2007 was the last day of my acquaintance with Anias. Things were never the same between us after Ryder and I had been superseded in Anias's heart by a third party long before I met Soma Red. Anias was also never comfortable with how the stories I wrote about us made it seem like I was a gray digging cat who just wants a pony princess to be her friend. Nor did she care for the way I would follow her around in real life like a needy little sister when she wanted to have adventures without me. We stayed together for a year longer than we should have because I was still no good at ending things. And sometimes those 12 months felt like that painful moment in Orson Welles' 1965 when Henry is telling Fowstaff to fuck off and Fowstaff is just crumpled there in too much pain to move. Shortly after Anias and I broke up, things fell apart with another cis woman I was seeing, Proxima. She wanted me to be exclusive and I once again got the trapped and panicky feeling twice ever thus. Much like Soma, my relationship with Proxima was a bright light rather than a sustained one and it burned all the hotter because Anias did not approve of me dating Proxima. So we had to keep on the dark end of the street. Turns out my consensual closed mouth stage kiss in an acting class 10 years earlier did prove I was capable of all manner of immoral malfeasance, but it was worth it for the way Proxima and I clicked on that first to bear back night both of our tendencies towards ferrality, finding a kindred soul and a kindred flesh in the other with her sharp bits in my soft parts and vice versa. The way her appearance chameleon chameleoned under the black light when she tied her hair back, sometimes looking like the rank stranger with large tired eyes she had been a week before and sometimes eerily familiar. The raised skin scratching and biting and leaving many nebula and galactic clusters, flecks of ink skin and blood under our nails, her deep sharps gasps when touched or bitten or twisted just so. The sheer amount of sweat that we generated and shared and mixed. The way she smelled and tasted that wonderful sound she made when she orgasmed and around half past midnight, brief sleep. Proxima cuddling my leg murmuring with little tremors passing through her body as she dozed off amid coy-told pieta during which I napped as well until we both jolted awake a little after 1 a.m. And for the next few hours we were aware that we both had to work the next day and she needed to go home but we kept at each other all the same energy levels, dipping and then spiking again, the green and purple fog beginning to glow, the tenacity that comes with the thrill of discovery and most of all that Meredith Monk was right about in permanence, but this is it. Right now, this moment, this last minute and as much as I wanted to will the night to last forever, every moment comes to an end and now the longing begins. Another big plus was that the blood and raven-haired Proxima was my height and nothing was hotter than being at eye level with a cis woman. After I broke up with Soma and then Proxima, I felt all the guilt that I got punished for not exhibiting when I broke up with Callie but still nothing compared to the guilt I would never stop feeling about hurting Ivy. Sometimes you're foul staffed being told by Henry to fuck off and sometimes you're Henry telling foul staff to fuck off. Both are exquisitely painful and both are necessary experiences. That's what I told myself after experiencing both and it continued to confirm that Tiro was right that I did these things in the worst way possible. For sure, I knew I would never forgive myself for not becoming friends with Kelly Michaels. We had dinner a few weeks after we met and it didn't work. Our worlds were too different and it was like meeting the big sister who had disappeared into my brother Jim's closet and discovering that we had nothing in common, nothing to offer each other. I did book Kelly to perform when my unearned confidence resulted in me producing the trance stage at the official 2007 Pride Sunday celebration. I was super frazzled that day because of the sheer scale of the production and all the fires I had to put out but that was no excuse for how curt I was with Kelly and she arrived late. It was a failure of compassion on my part and though I never saw her again, I knew the look in her blue eyes on that late June day would always haunt me. My heart was not big enough and if you should never meet your heroes then I taught Kelly that you should never meet your fans because fans are the worst. I was the worst. I was a bad person, which was why I drove people away. Positive accentuation via sinful vanity. With all the heartbreak, there was still plenty of adventure and I maintained my decadence spiral in the 18 months after breaking up with Soma. It never reached Valencia levels of Lambda literary award-winning hedonism because I was not and never would be Michelle T and who reads weak would always beat my year but by Sheryl and Connelly standards, it was a damn good ride. Euphemism meeting Perdita was coined when a cis woman named Haley and I were on our first day to divas. Me on my second drink and Haley on her third. We were talking about cats and we were talking about cats and when I told Haley about Perdita, Haley said wistfully, I wanna meet her. I wanna meet Perdita. So we returned to the Black Light District so Haley could meet Perdita and so Haley and I could have fantastic sex. It was during this era of feral fecundity, this era of impressions rather than ideas and of situations rather than subjects that I discovered that casual sex with women I was not emotionally attached to could approach the hallucinatory levels Annie Sprinkle had written about that it could become a swirling descent into pure aesthetic attractions and the chemical reactions where the only emotion is an insatiable hunger for those aesthetics and chemicals creating the most delicious feedback loop the most virtuous of circles. I hooked up with not just once in future porn stars but also strippers and rent girls. Not because any of them had been those things but by virtue of when and where I was most everyone I dated was either a former current or future sex worker. I wanted to have sex with Haley because she was tall and had a Sharon King vibe about her but knowing she had also been a dancer, the lusty lady made it feel all the more like we were living inside exile on Main Street's kickoff track, Rocks Off which had been my favorite Rolling Stones song since long before I realized it was the greatest song ever recorded about achieving sleazy apotheosis through fucking. I mean the hint is right there in the title but 14 year old Sherilyn did not know what the phrase Rocks Off meant let alone that most rock and roll songs are about sex. She only knew Rocks Off was high energy ear candy about being bored by sunshine and preferring to chase shadowing mysteries by moonlight and getting to a place where she can't even feel the pain anymore. And it was so addictive that years passed before she listened to the rest of Exile on Main Street and discovered her second favorite Rolling Stones song I just want to see his face. 34 year old Sherilyn still loved Rocks Off for all the potential it represented and came to learn that any night on the dirty road which ended with honey and glitter splattered on her skin and clothes was by definition a good night. Sometimes those red marks from candle wax and those were good nights too. Thus concludes my reading. Thank you very much. Hope you enjoyed and hope you read the book sometime. All right, thank you everybody for attending and right before we conclude and finish off I would like to mention about Summer Stride. To the summer, our Summer Stride program library offers free in person and virtual program for all ages and abilities designed to inspire reading, learning and exploring for at least 20 minutes a day. Listening in this program counts towards an hour of activity. So please sign up for 2020 Summer Stride library book and get a booktube for free. Especially good for shopping. Visit our libraries SAPL.org Summer Stride book list and upcoming events. Visit our library's YouTube page to see past events and also as well coming up tomorrow we also have a book club for Melinda Lowe's last night in Telegraph Club tomorrow at 7 p.m. And also on Wednesday it is not only because of the book club there's also you'll get to meet the author Melinda Lowe last night to the Telegraph in the book club on Wednesday, July 29th around noon and it will be on Zoom. Thank you everybody. Are there any questions for Sherlyn? No, I guess not. Okay, all right then thank you everybody and this thus concludes Sherlyn's program Beautiful Ghost. Thank you everybody and you all have a lovely evening.