I’m used to being alone. When I was a child, it felt very lonely, but the older I get, the more normal it feels. As I’ve written about on here many times, I’ve shifted a lot over the past 10 or so years. I’d say at the height of my supposed attempt at being a housewife, I’d say I was a pretty introverted person. I was content with staying in, doing things around the home and living a smaller, more modest life. I didn’t want for much, but I also didn’t know very much of the world at all. I was replicating a much more conservative version of what I’d seen my mother do. Perhaps more conservative, because I was attempting to fit into a more conservative family in a more conservative space. I’m glad that phase of mine has passed, but it was an outgrowth of a long history of having a limited imagination and a shallow reference point. My reference point has always been off, though. I was raised pretty sheltered and the one thing I do appreciate about it, is it made it so that I’m very good at entertaining myself. I write, I sew, I draw, I sing, I create. I have a DIY spirit partially born from this idea of accepting a certain degree of isolation. Isolation that may have been imposed on me, which I’ve become a bit too used to. I’d say for the first portion of my life, I didn’t really enjoy going beyond my neighborhood. Like these invisible lines were drawn on a map that I wasn’t allowed to pass. And those boundaries have expanded more and more with time. To this day, I think I spend so much time on Hollywood Blvd because it’s just within the lines I drew for myself when I used to jump on the bus and go to the Blvd and imagine what it was like living in the city. Now that I live here, I’m quite a drastically different person from that failing aspiring housewife and that scared little gender queer child who used this place as exposure therapy and gender exploration.
When I first started running away to Hollywood, I’d get on a bus after stuffing my boy clothes behind the bushes near the bus stop across from my development. Underneath my suspiciously oversized hoodie and jeans, I had a dress I’d made from a t-shirt. Few people know this, but my original username for m Youtube channel was TransDIY because I was a transgender woman who did DIY projects before I was a transgender woman who moaned about men. I guess things changed because men became such a prominent presence in my life. When I was younger, men were everything. They were love, they were hate, they were survival and they were death. At least it felt that way. Coming to Hollywood, I was determined to live there and I knew I needed to make money to afford rent to get out of my parent’s house. So as a teenager, I spent time with older men who were able to feed me and some of them put money in my pocket. I knew men desired me, but I did not understand my own desire or my own boundaries. What men did to me felt like it was meant to be that way. Going to LA made it apparent that I “passed” because I could be a completely different person in the city. I think that’s actually why I was so drawn to it. This idea that I could be myself, but without the preamble.
I’ll probably write about this at some point, but a few years ago, I started a bit of a burlesque journey. It was something I tried to do for a project that really uprooted a lot my soul in a way that I wasn’t quite expecting it to. While I’d had all of these conversations about how my boundaries have changed and how I’d become more sex positive, I was terrified of being seen on a stage gesturing in a sexual manner. I’m sure that sounds bizarre to some of you now, but so much of my life has relied on public modesty, but private depravity. I have unfortunately existed on the rather extreme ends of the Madonna/Whore dichotomy. As an adult, I’d spent a lot of time trying to forget those men I engaged with a teenager. The abuse they experienced that to this day I struggle to describe as such. The need for me to acknowledge what has happened, but how much it conflicts with my more conservative upbringing that makes it hard for me to ever truly feel that “victim” is an accurate term. I think I’ll forever be a person constantly moving forward, but struggling not to think of how these steps register with where I’ve been before. When I pretended to be a good girl for my ex, I realized that I’m a terrible liar. Performance sometimes feels like a lie to me. I think that’s why I never went very far as an actress. But I committed to learning about Burlesque, and in the process, I learned a bit about magic.
My Burlesque mother is a sapphic witch; to the surprise of no one. Mae Lust taught me that magic can mean many things, and that there are many different ways of viewing it, but one is through the lens of ritual. These little actions you take day by day that set you down the right path. There’s both a woo and a non-woo understanding of it, and as a skeptic, I do appreciate that. For one of our rituals, we had regular check-ins where a group of femmes all get into a circle and place items we want to be blessed on an altar. One by one, and sometimes in tandem, we move our bodies the way they feel drawn to move. No movement is too crass, no gesture too inappropriate. The feminine energy in the room is tangible. Each person embodies femininity in a way that feels unique to them, with the nuance of our sexual person taking shape as our energies and intention focused on the altar. I learned that these sexual persons have nuance and layers and that each of us has, more or less, a trinity of them.
You find these sexual persons by choosing from a list of about ten of them, which feels the most accurate to you in the moment. The one that scared me the most was the “Innocent Teaser,” a curious fae-like icon. Scared me because it was the one that felt like it was the one most related to my trauma. However, the Enigma, a weirdo sex priestess who prefers solace, felt the most familiar. The sexiest of them to me? The Ice Queen: a strong and cold, but glamorous icon that has no problems drawing boundaries. A bit of a Domme, really. She’s the one I admired the most, the one I feel I am the least like.
Last week as I got off the subway on Hollywood and Vine, I realized something. For most of my life, I’ve come to this place and walked all the way from the Pantages to the Fonda. In fact, I often do it when I get a new outfit or feel particularly cute that day. I’ve stomped over these stars so many times, and rarely, if ever, do I read them. However, one day as I was taking this walk I’ve taken many times, I spotted Theda Bara’s star. My only real context for her was a college class. It was my first feminist class, and it was about lesbian vampires. I think I took it thinking it would be an easy grade, but it turned me into a feminist. Theda Bara was one of Hollywood’s first “vamps”, and while I won’t pretend to be a huge fan (again, celebrity) I do admire what she represents and has represented. As I thought about that, I thought about how all of these lines connected to each other at this exact point. This place, that class, this street, this star, this figure, these ideas. Who would I be without these things? Without a reference point. As I had these thoughts, I realized that in many ways, this walk of mine is a ritual. A confidence ritual I’ve been performing since I was a teenager. When we danced towards our setting spray or our favorite necklace during that Burlesque check-in, it doesn’t really matter whether or not our items are actually imbued with sex magic. The memory of how I felt in that moment is distilled into this object, which will inspire me to recall it, and that confidence will be projected. When I’d come here in my upcycled t-shirt dress, every compliment I got made me feel just that much more confident being myself. In retrospect, I looked like a plum-fool, but I do appreciate the confidence those people chose to give me at that phase of my life. Even if walking the blvd doesn’t imbue me with sex magic, the pattern of taking this walk when I feel good has increased my confidence and put me where I am now, but of course, I can’t pretend it’s all good. Another thing that hasn’t changed about me since I was young is that I still don’t drive, meaning I take public transportation most places I go when ride-share gets too expensive. I think people over-dramatize the dangers of public transportation in LA. Things are much scarier on the streets when you’re alone.
Something I’ve really tried to get across to people is that there’s a bit of a misalignment between how people see me and how I actually am. Because I am an openly transgender blogger who is black, people often assume that I find safety and comfort primarily in queer spaces. They also usually think that I face extreme stigma around the men that I date, and that much of the way I navigate through society is informed by that. I never really know the right way to engage with this assumption because it often feels like I am disappointing people when I flat-out narrate my life. People don’t really register that the only way I could have possibly been stealth is by “passing” and really, really fracturing myself in a way that was indeed quite homophobic and transphobic. People don’t tend to understand that the content they saw of me in 2016-2017 was part of me pulling myself out of a lot of my very sheltered programming. When I was younger, I’d imagine my mid-thirties as the time when I’d be raising children, maybe working as a teacher, the way my grandmother did, and the way my ex’s mother did. I imagined that after a colorful life in art, I’d be starting to truly settle down, but things did not at all go that way. But that was my reference point up to that point. I had read about other ways of living, but I didn’t believe they were possible for me. I’m ashamed to say this out loud, but I did for a while believe that I wasn’t really capable of doing much else; a defeatist attitude I think I inherited from my father. Since dumping my ex, I’ve been “off script” and it’s gone well, but I am still not what people imagine me to be.
People are always so confused when they see that I get along quite well with straight people and have a degree of comfort around white people that is, perhaps, unwarranted. They view my comfort as a sign of self-hatred. Like, I’m choosing to be around white people, because I hate black people, and choosing to be around straight people because I hate queer people. However, the truth is that’s my reference point. My parents were very deliberate about raising me where I was raised, outside of predominantly black spaces, and so I’m very used to being the only black person in the room. I’m…straight, and when you couple that with being stealth in the OC for most of your 20s, that’s not really going to prime you for productive queer friendships. I was a massive pick me during and post-college, which of course isolated me from a lot of women. There are things I express online and advocate for that reflect my developing understanding. There’s so much I have to learn about socializing with queer people, having healthy friendships with women, and decentering men. These are active things I have to work on, not because of self-hatred or denial, but because, again, I don’t have the reference point. I’m still learning about myself and others. One thing I do register is that many of the things I’ve normalized aren’t particularly good for me. I’ve also recognized that many of these things are outgrowths of capitalistic propaganda and misogyny. On one hand, I want to grow out of these patterns, on the other hand, I’m finding that I move very differently than most people seem to.
As I’ve shared here several times, I have three local partners and one out-of-state partner. I’ve been with these partners now for quite some time, and I am pleased with them. My relationships all fall into different slots in a way, but they’re all functional. My partners are proud to be with me, they aren’t conflicted about their attraction to me, and they all dote on me and treat me quite well. They’re also significantly less social than I am, and except for Edward, older than I am. In a way, I’m living a very ass-backwards existence with my late 20s, early 30s being my “going out” era, but I kind of prefer it in a way since I can take care of myself for the most part. Every week, I go to a Goth club off Hollywood Boulevard, and what I’ve always loved about Goth clubs is that, for the most part, men leave you the fuck alone. At least that’s how it was at first. In the past few years, I’ve noticed an uptick of pickup culture in Goth clubs with what I’m assuming is an influx of baby bats and a shifting of the culture. I don’t… dance with anyone. I go there to dance alone. Yes, I look sexy, but it isn’t for you. It’s for me. It’s for the part of me that used to be so afraid to show my midriff. It’s for the part of me that needs to move my body and knows it will get too hot if some skin isn’t exposed. I’m not there to meet random men on the dance floor, but more deeply, I don’t think I have the reference point for it. I’m used to men viewing me as exotic; I’m used to them fetishizing me without knowing that I’m transgender simply because I’m black. I feel like men often consume me as a product, not a person. I have so many odd conversations with men that reveal that. Sometimes, like I shifted and sacrificed part of myself to be stealth, I’ll shift and sacrifice part of myself just to have an odd conversation. I don’t get to the Goth club until midnight on most nights, so usually I’ll go with my friend to an after-hours where he DJs. I can almost count on having an odd conversation there.
I moved to LA because I wanted to go to Goth clubs and Goth events. Without these things, I’m not sure I’d be here. I don’t go out on the weekends so whenever I meet people who are living it up on a weekday at somewhere other than a Goth club, I’m always very curious what they were up to. So a lot of times I try to make friends and chat with people. I meet such an interesting mixture of people. Minor celebrities, musicians, artists and more. It’s actually one of the only spaces where I intentionally interact with people who aren’t alternative. I’m so used to being around other weirdos, that I do occasionally forget that I am one myself. Usually, I’m wearing some sort of sexy outfit that feels like normal clothes to me, but may feel risque to people in attendance. There are dancers who stand on the stages at each end of the spot and because of how I dress, sometimes people think I’m one of them, which comes with a slew of assumptions. For the most part, I let them make these assumptions because I know this is likely the last time I’ll see them and in a way, I’m just trying to do field research. My sample is tainted, you know, with the cocaine and all, but still. I have the most interesting and most annoying conversations, but I still have them. I find people to be utterly fascinating and frankly, my guard is a bit more down at the afterhours because Im not there to dance.
I’ll talk to anyone, and I often do. I once had a really great conversation with the partner of a little person who loved K-pop as much as I did. She was so sweet, and we had the most bizarre conversation as we both ignored the men who were trying to get our attention. For obvious reasons, men often want my attention in these spaces that exist just after the club lets out and just before a bad, well, even worse decision is made. I can summarize most of my conversations with men as “the men are not alright.” Last week, I had a First Nations gentleman and a Russian guy both explain to me that they were really eager to “try” a black woman. An Italian man had a long conversation with me about what I wanted in life, which ended with him essentially telling me that it was my duty to continue procreating just so that my features would remain in the gene pool. It’s fascinating having all of these odd conversations with people who will immediately project certain things onto me. As a trans woman, I find it to be kinda fascinating the various ways I’m interpreted.
There was a biker I had a bit of a crush on for a bit; a gentlemanly dude with a nice head of hair, a Harley (lol), and a great smile. One of the few men I’d say I was actually fairly attracted to in a “lizard brain” kinda way… and he turned out to be a MAGA dude. I didn’t really find out until he was posting a bunch of crap on his page about boys in locker rooms. For a while, we debated. He was the only MAGA guy I’d really spoken to in years. But I couldn’t maintain my air for very long. When he first met me, he told me that I “seemed like a church girl”. Ironically, he saw a part of me I often assume isn’t visible to others. Yeah, I have a lot of these strange conversations to learn about people who are different than me, but I also learn a lot about myself. Sometimes lessons aren’t flattering. Perhaps I say my tolerance for these conversations stems from intellectual curiosity, but it may be a form of masochism that comes from having fewer boundaries and lower self-esteem, not truly being the Ice Queen. I think the uncomfortable thing for me is that I’m unsure. That’s the point of my own self-development, I’m at.
As it stands, I have this fear of becoming a ghost. I spent most of my 20s becoming one as I distanced myself from my family and friends. My family’s rejection of me was very hard for me to take and since I found so much solace in men, I’ve naturally managed to find a few good ones that aren’t abusive or toxic. Men who aren’t trying to exploit me, just enrich me and love me. I have to remind myself that I am very fortunate to have them, as they are fortunate to have me. Time is finite, and I think that one of my challenges will always be that it’s actually quite hard to maintain multiple loving relationships and also many deep and close friendships. I had my deepest friendships in my youth. I find that I am skeptical and suspicious of most people I’ve not come to know well, which makes true friendship hard. Those who I’d call friends are ever-present in my mind and do not require constant upkeep. We’ve danced on the same floor or around the same pires, cried over the same person, held each other when we need to, and advocated for each other when the other is out of the room. I think friendship has always been complex for me because I am such a solo person. I struggle to conceive of things I’d truly enjoy doing in tandem with another person when I’m not romantically involved with them. In a way, I want to blame my reference point, but at what point does that transform into preference?
In a way, I feel malnourished. The Burlesque coven was great because I was able to build and develop something creative with other femmes. It felt nice to be surrounded by mostly women, cultivating a space for the feminine and the appreciation of it. I know that I desire more of that, but at the same time, my reference point is being rejected, denied, or stigmatized in these contexts. But when I say that, the truth is, it’s a faraway memory. I haven’t truly experienced rejection from women’s spaces; in fact, they’re the only ones that have ever embraced me, but I am terrified of that. Terrified of having to directly deal with the very harsh reality that, for most of my life, before I ever claimed transwomanhood, I was essentialized into a female-shaped box. That’s because of that, I’ve been harmed; and it’s still hard for me to not blame the shape of my body, one that’s never been altered surgically, that’s always had a curve, for why that happened. And when I imagine that rejection, it’s not hard for me to immediately feel that safety exists among men. The pick-me parts of my brain almost rewire to adjust to that delusion, but I know that isn’t true. Life has shown me that.
The point I’m often trying to get across when I speak about not being queer, identifying as heterosexual and that being a very big part of who I am is to make the point that I am still very much working to decenter men, that my politics may be more queer than most straight women’s, but I’m still a straight woman working through a lot of ignorance and phobia. Maybe I’m just more open and honest about that, but it sometimes feels like I need to be so that people understand that I am always growing and what I express is often an extension of what I’m learning and a reflection of my desire to share what I’ve learned and ignorance I’ve had to pull myself out of. I often feel that I don’t deserve the assumption of queer proximity most give me, frankly, because I am black and transgender. It often feels like people have this resistance to simply hearing what I have experienced because they would like to believe a completely different narrative they identify with more. I’ve never identified as a gay man, I’ve never been known in this world as a man, my dating pool has primarily consisted of straight men and not because of my own sensitivity around identity. At 35, I can now say I’ve been in more relationships than not; and that’s part of the problem. If you listen to me speak about my life and you think to yourself “wow, Kat sure does spend a lot of time with men. She sure does spend a lot of time with straight people. She sure could stand to have a more positive relationships with women”, all of these things are the result of me being raised very conservative and being motivated to center men. These are hard baked in habits I’m trying to break. I am self aware, but old habits die hard and patterns repeat for a reason, sometimes I have to catch myself in them.
Part of why I share so much about myself is to start those conversations, and I think the part people have missed is that I’ve never really attempted to have these conversations as an expert on these things, but as a person who probably spends more time thinking about them than most people. I’ve been litigating and openly speaking about these issues for most of my life. I’m only able to communicate it more clearly because I’ve been doing it for so long. That shouldn’t be confused with the idea that I am done developing. I’m not. I don’t think I’ll ever be. No matter how old I get, I will remain a student of life, but I still think I’d prefer my own company.
Blaque In The City 
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