The Full Spectrum Read online

  girl, you …

  girl, you need to find

  your body isn't this one

  this time

  and he clenches his fist,

  grabbing belt loops in tightened fingers,

  holding grief and

  pain and

  shame and

  strife, a

  life in

  chains, and

  still at

  night he

  settles into

  dreaming of himself

  free, unbound, flat.

  his chest heaves with relief and breathing,

  filled with the hope

  that someday

  he will

  believe.

  Nice Ass

  by Jesse Cameron Alick

  I have a nice ass

  For reals.

  I shit you not.

  When I walk down the street,

  I cause car accidents.

  My buttocks are round and firm as mangos

  and twice as sweet.

  I could sell jeans with my ass

  I could have it plastered

  on billboards all over the country.

  People in every corner of the United States

  would be saying

  “Now that's a very nice ass.”

  Whoa,

  isn't that a weird concept?

  I could make a living off my ass.

  God Bless America.

  “Girl + Faggots”

  by Caspian Gray

  So I was pretty apathetic about coming to college—all my friends were nervous or thrilled or sad, and I was blank, with only the vaguest feeling of bring it on, because I'm defensive by nature. I've been out for four years, and am no longer afraid all the time because I'm a dyke—I expect people to accept me, and when they don't, I don't even hate them for it anymore. Xuan Ho, who says he loves me, left weeks ago for the Marines, and Lara has already twisted my heart around enough that for now I am comfortably numb. Whitman, who is my only other friend, spends time with me eating at the Waffle House and having deep philosophical conversations helped along by liberal amounts of Tsingtao beer. I paint his nails in stripes of black and amber, but when night rolls around, he always sleeps on the couch.

  I miss touching people.

  Then I make it into the Read dorm, where I am a “scholar” and therefore deserving of the very best that Ohio University has to offer. This means that my room is clean and relatively large, and that the bathroom isn't supporting any unrecognized new forms of life. My roommate is fluffy and pleasant, and her inner arms have the scars that say cutter, but the rest of her smiles and says welladjusted teen. I am jealous, because despite medication and therapy, I am far from well-adjusted, and I always had the sense to put my scars in places that wouldn't be revealed by short sleeves. So I smile back and prepare myself for a long quarter of spending a lot of time on my own, which is pretty much what I've always done. My mom asks if she can call me every day, and I say yes once I realize that she is serious.

  I have the odd, uncomfortable idea that I can smell myself all the time, this warm, margarine scent emanating from my crotch. I shower obsessively, just in case other people can smell it, too.

  When I go to the Coming Out discussion group, I take a little flier and tape it to my dorm door, writing Closets Suck on the dryerase board above it. My roommate says she doesn't mind; this is my way of searching for any other queers in the Read/Johnson Scholars Complex.

  It turns out that there are only three of us. They are both boys, both thin and flaming, but fun. Jason is short and constantly writing messages for people on their doors, and Ray is tall with a solemn side that sits oddly on him. I meet them both the same day, and it is Ray's birthday. He is nineteen.

  To celebrate, they hold the Dorm Slut Olympics, and I am the torchbearer. The torch is four bananas held together with a hair band, and the first event is the Banana Deep Throat. A girl named Caitlinn goes for the gold, taking the whole banana down. Everyone is awed. Jason is silver, and my roommate gets an honorable mention. I decline, since dick is not my thing, and I have no desire to practice on produce filched from Shively Hall. Then there is the Best Fake Orgasm competition, and again Caitlinn wins hands down. This time Ray gets silver, and while he's performing, one of the ROTC boys from downstairs keeps touching himself through his pants. I laugh to myself, because it's so cliché for the fauxsoldiers to lust after one of my epicene new friends.

  When it's over, and most people have paired off and disappeared, Ray and Jason and I crawl under the blankets in Ray's bed, which is a top bunk. I relish the feeling of other people's legs tangled with mine, my small breasts pillowing Ray's head. It is all perfectly innocent, but I am glad to be in the middle as we halfwatch The Daily Show. I've missed having people to be close to, to the point that this simple human connection is bliss. I only met them this afternoon, but after watching them both fellate bananas, it would be hard not to be friends. We pull Ray's comforter over our heads and say silly things and practice for tomorrow's Olympic event, which will be Heterosexual Dirty Talk with a Partner. I ask Jason if I can lick every wrinkle in his ball sack, and he laughs and pretends to feel around in my pants, telling me to just let him know when he finds my labia. We decide that we'll be funny rather than sexy, because it's already obvious that Caitlinn dominates as the official Dorm Slut.

  Then Ray complains that he can't see the TV because he's in the back, and I ask him if he wants to be in the middle, because he is the Birthday Boy. It's not long before he and Jason are no longer spooning, but obviously curled up in each other. Jason keeps taking the comforter away from me so that I am outside the circle, and then Ray keeps fixing it so that I'm back in with them. I don't know if he's nervous or just trying to be polite, but I can take a hint. I climb down from the top bunk and collect the few other people still in the room, not so subtly letting them know that Ray will be receiving head whether they stick around or not, but that they might not want to witness it. Since no one's left but me and straight boys, they all clear out. I shut the door gently behind me and wander back to my own room.

  I'm not surprised to feel lonely, only disappointed in myself. I'd rather be used to it by now, but I'm not. I don't know what I miss more: Whitman's shifty reluctance when I pull him into a hug, or Lara laughing while I kiss her chin, or Xuan Ho giving me a hickey and then freaking out in case his girlfriend sees it. They are home, or were home, and I feel like a drifter without them. My classes haven't been in session long enough to be challenging, and it feels like they might never be. With nothing to distract me, I wish that I was a frat boy chasing pussy, or at least a queer getting free oral sex because it is my birthday. Instead, I'm just me, laughing along with the ghosts in my head.

  Something for the Ladies

  by Danny Thanh

  Whenever someone asks how it is that I have so many girl friends, I am quick to respond, “It's a gift I acquired before even popping out my mother's hoo-hoo.”

  I remember Mother telling me about how I was my parents' third, and final, attempt at having a son. “Meh' and Ba' already have two daughters, we wanted a boy. Every week Mommy went to St. Martin church, and I prayed we will get a son. But doctor said Mommy going to have girl again, so there is nothing I can do about it. It was like Mommy have cursed womb. Ba' said it okay—we love third daughter just as much as any child. But every day, I still pray. On the day I delivered, you come out and nurse wrapped you in cloth to go and clean off a little … and she come back screaming, ‘You have boy! You have boy!’ and she shoved your pee-pee in Mommy's face.

  “And Mommy soooo happy I forgot I hate Daddy for making Mommy pregnant,” she coldly concluded, with squinted eyes and a white-knuckled fist.

  All my life I was told I was a girl. My mom and dad had their “Third Daughter” story to recite at their friends' parties. The adults found it cutely amusing. I cannot begin to count the number of times they pinched my cheeks in adoration, or the number of times th
eir children pointed and laughed, saying my name should be Danielle and not Danny.

  Because I wielded athletic abilities below that of a severe anorexic, I was always the last picked for the kickball team and relayracing group during physical education. The disappointing final choice was between Tonya Stevens and me, and the team captain let out a reluctant sigh before pointing to my pig-tailed counterpart, who hobbled on her crutches to join the ranks. Once during a race around the school's track field, the baton was slapped into my palm and I sprinted twenty yards before lying on the ground, hyperventilating, like a spastic jellyfish. I sat up after my breath regulated and looked around to find the other kids quaking in seizures of uncontrollable laughter.

  The other boys decided I was incredibly inept at sports due to the fact that I was really a girl. While they were throwing orange balls into hoops under the baking sun and jostling one another, I sat on the side staring at the frying pavement. Occasionally the players would dare a bold individual to venture up to me, alone on the bench. “Dude, like—check it out, like—why do you run like a girl?” Timothy Woods once questioned, reenacting his version of my running—which resembled a swishing model's runway trot in fast motion. I wanted to point out that though it may seem that I walked like a fashion model, it sure beat his running posture: a bull-legged gallop, suggesting a number of jagged objects were crowding his rectum. But instead I simply smiled and nodded as he returned to his cackling clan.

  My relationship to sports could be summarized by the jazz shoes beneath my bed, and the stack of tapes I used to record any Summer Olympic event that required the male athletes to wear Lycra. Luckily, my parents, having immigrated to the United States from Vietnam, had a very out-of-touch sense of homoerotica. It would take a masculine-looking drag queen, singing and dancing with a chorus of animated dildos and a backdrop of men dryhumping each other, before Mom and Dad would even begin to scratch their heads thinking, “Oi cha! That woman with sequins and feather boa singing ‘Voulez vous couchez avec moi’—she must really be wearing a wig.”

  My mother would nudge my father to bring his attention to me, sitting before the television set, licking my lips to the sight of men doing tumbles in leotards and diving in Speedos. “I think Danny wants become Olympian when he grow up!” she exclaimed with hope.

  High school lacked any sexual tension between the girls I was around and me. Our genuine friendship was complemented with their comfort, knowing I would never force myself near their cooters. While my father expected me to invite guys over from the judo club he signed me up for, the only friends that came through our front door were adorned with glittery eye shadow and pubertyriddled 36C Victoria's Secrets. Witnessing the sea of different girls coming in and out of our home, my mom began to worry that I had turned into a teenage gigolo.

  “You make friends with too many white girls, Danny. Why don't you make friends with Vietnamese girl for Mommy? If you're around so many girls like that, Mommy's future Vietnamese daughter-in-law get scared off. She think Mommy's baby only like the white.”

  “Oh, Mom, we're just friends,” I tried to reassure her, before returning to the phone to arrange another night of miniature golf with my harem.

  With influences from my girl friends and my English teachers— their suggested literary readings of Kate Chopin and Audre Lorde—I also became a feminist. I was the only man in a crowd of topless, breast-feeding women at a public park, chanting, “Women have the right! Women have the right!” I denounced my own genitalia, and every man's, as a symbol of sexism during our American Politics discussion of Roe v. Wade. I was the shoulder my friend Denay cried on when she caught her boyfriend wearing a gorilla suit, having sex with a girl caked with clown makeup. “Men are pigs!” I comforted her. “Well … straight men, anyways. You deserve better.”

  I would find my friend Meling rolling around on her bed, clutching her lower stomach, moaning like a tortured cat, “God damn this period. I knew it was gonna hit like a—ack! It's been six months since I got the last one, and BAM! So irregular. I wish I were dead.” Kneeling on the side of her bed, I asked Meling if there was anything I could do, and she commanded, “Go and fetch me a box of pads with a carton of cookie-dough ice cream, you bitch!”

  Cradling the package of feminine hygiene products in one arm and the ice cream in my free hand, I walked to the cash register at the grocery store. As I walked by, women with babies, women arm-in-arm with their partners, and women pushing lonely carts turned and smiled at me. I looked down to make sure people weren't looking at some mysterious stain on my crotch I had overlooked.

  “Fucking men. I wish guys would bleed out their asses once a month, goddammit,” my godsister wailed during her heavy flow, looking at me with spite.

  Though I couldn't help that my anatomy was different, I felt remorse for not having an intrusive monthly visitor. It was like surviving a plane crash and living with the guilt that it was someone else, and not you, who had to die. I did the only thing I could to make my girl friends' lives better: I began carrying feminine hygiene products in my backpack to school. This act alone gained me the importance of a drug dealer, and my lady friends became a horde of dope fiends.

  Instead of fishing to find a quarter at the bottom of their purses, girls would come up to me during classes, attempting to discreetly ask for assistance with a hearty, “I'm on the rag—help me!” I would then rapidly pull out everything I had available and showcase them with my hands, like a stage girl on The Price Is Right.

  “Do you want a tampon or a pad? I have the pad with or without wings. These overnighters with wings are really absorbent, so if you're surfing a big crimson wave, this is the one. But if you want a tampon, I have to suggest these superabsorbent ultrathins, because you can barely feel them and they're made from unbleached cotton, not rayon. If you want to be environmentally friendly, however, I just got the Instead: Alternative Feminine Protection Cup from an infomercial. You just squeeze it, like so, and gently glide it within yourself, firmly positioning it right behind the pubic bone….”

  I'd continue to advertise, sounding like a desperate door-to-door salesman, before the girl of the moment just snatched the closest item and waddled in a rush toward the restroom.

  To my girl friends' disappointment, I eventually had to stop providing. I came home one night to find my mom standing at the door, holding out an open palm with a still-packaged tampon she had found while searching my backpack with motherly curiosity. Having seen an anti-drug commercial on TV, she was convinced that as a good parent it was her duty to invade my privacy.

  “What is this? Mommy found it in baby's backpack!”

  “Huh? That's not mine.”

  “This belong to girl you sleep with?”

  “No …”

  “You sleep with those white girls?”

  “No, Mom! Ummmm … that … that belongs to Tam—”

  “Who?”

  “Tam …Tran?”

  “Vietnamee friend-a huh?”

  “Yeah, Mom. She's a—”

  “Tam la' girl?”

  “Yeah, Mom, Tam's a girl—”

  “Oh, you make Mommy soooo happy. My baby find good girlfriend for Mommy.”

  My mother consumed the story not because she wholeheartedly believed it, but because it was easier to digest than previous suspicions. After slapping the tampon into my hands, she ran toward the back of the house and into my parents' room, calling out for my dad with a smile spanning her face.

  “Ba'! Ba'! Danny … those tampon not for white hoo-chee. Our baby found Vietnamee girl!”

  They cheered in the same magnificent shrilled roar I had learned to associate with a football touchdown. Quietly, I walked into the kitchen with the tampon in my hand, and reached into a drawer to pull out a small brown paper bag. I dropped the slender environmentally-safe-unbleached-cotton-plug inside. After listening to the crinkling sound of the paper bag being wrapped, I walked outside and discreetly disposed of it in the neighbor's trash can and quit my j
ob as a feminine-hygiene-product dealer—cold turkey.

  Click and Drag

  by Joel de Vera Moncada

  fed up

  surrendering to the

  Monday through Sunday search

  for a meaningful

  IM chat

  with an unknown male

  screen-named

  xxsexydownepnoixxx

  fed up

  with fraudulent pictures

  of half-naked

  underdeveloped

  homo-bodied impostors

  of a thug's life

  fed up

  with countless face pics

  poses of

  smiles / dimples / squints in the eyes

  puckers of chapped lips

  as if tweaked to perfection

  by adobe photoshop

  fed up

  with homework break searches

  midnight profile snacks

  hoping to stumble upon

  a man of depth

  soul jazz enthusiast

  to hum ditties with

  ambitious artist

  to find inspiration with

  after reading

  scanning

  countless

  exaggerated descriptions

  posted on profiles under

  about me headings

  fed up

  with the mission

  the dreary click and drag

  through drop-down search toolbars

  as I select

  location / san francisco bay area

  status / single

  age / 20 to 30

  sex / male

  preference / doesn't matter

  ethnicity / doesn't matter

  just be as dark as me

  cause www.downelink.com

  exhausts all the same boys

  i've already seen in

  AOL's gam4gam / four years ago

  in www.friendster.com / one year ago

  my online search for a soul mate

  desperately longs for

  a 100 percent match

  a single man to

  send me a message

  about wanting to get to know me