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As we move from the arts and film portion (my preferred one) of this year’s Pride festivities to the final drunk and debauched weekend, I feel compelled to comment on some of what I’ve witnessed and experienced.

To kick things off, I attended Fresh Meat, an annual queer/trans performance (mostly dance) that I’d been wanting to go to for years, but never actually did. I think it was hard for me to accept or even believe that in the last five or so years, I went from being a tomboy who obsessed over the sports pages and watched SportsCenter religiously to being an artsy boy who uses the sports pages for kindling and would rather watch gender-variant folks doing modern dance or clog around the stage than even discuss who was in the NBA finals.

I particularly liked Sean Dorsey Dance’s Uncovered: The Diary Project (the full-length version is even better), themed around the diaries of transsexual gay man and pioneer, Lou Sullivan, and a performance piece by D’Lo, who blew me away with hir ability to perform a variety of genders, unraveling the complexities within each, and rocked my heart with the love that s/he expressed for hir bois, reminding me how my expanding network of trans-masculine people is my own source of personal strength.

Perhaps what moved me most about this night was the realization of how many of us there are out there, enough not just for one trans dance troupe, but for every variety of performance and dance — tap, modern, hip-hop, rock, folk — and that we exist across and through every culture, ethnicity, and race. There was a moment when I was sitting there in the audience and I thought, “This explosion of creativity, of self-expression, a sense of openness, support and community, this best represents the world that I want to live in.”

The next day, I watched Boy I Am, a documentary, and the best trans film I’ve ever seen, that played in Frameline two years ago and has nothing to do with this year’s events, except that I watched it in the middle of them. Between this and Fresh Meat, I heard and saw people binding (with ace bandages, layered sports bras, and tanktop binders like the ones I used to wear from Underworks) for the first time since my own surgery, and had what I felt like was a post-traumatic stress response.

I remember a few years ago when a good friend of mine told me he found binding “comfortable,” and how shocked I was, having just started to experience the excessive sweating, chafing, and constriction of crushing my breasts against my chest. I didn’t argue with him, nor did I argue with my father who referred to my behavior as self-injurious. It was destructive, but it was also palliative. Binding was a survival technique, not that I could’ve said that at the time — to acknowledge my struggle, the physical agony that somehow alleviated the mental and emotional agony, was impossible.

I was just developing a transgender identity back then, one that wasn’t predicated on a desire to become a man, the sense that I was a man, or any desire to take on perceived male social or sex roles, but rather an increasing awareness of the deep discomfort with the gendered parts of my body in a way that seemed so different from standard body image issues surrounding things like weight. I struggled with my desire for top surgery as a cosmetic modification and was fearful that speaking about it like that would do a disservice to trans people fighting desperately for health insurance to cover what is most often construed by the industry as “elective” surgery. For awhile, I convinced myself it was elective, at least for me, because to feel like I didn’t have a choice, that I couldn’t fight it, that I would have to accept the phenomenal challenge of being transgender was too hard.

I’ve changed. We all do. But it is still my fear, especially in discussing/writing about transgender subjects, that I will regret my words, take a stance that is not politically forward thinking to the cause of greater acceptance, understanding, and visibility. At least 70% of my trans friends cannot afford the $8,000 for top surgery and may never be able to on their own. They are not working towards a trans identity like I was; they have one. And as I continue to step up to the challenge of embracing myself as transgender, it is remarkable how I am still one of the privileged, the lucky ones, to be white and raised upper middle class, is to be instilled with the foundation and expectation that I always get what I want, even if it’s something socially deviant like having my breasts cut off.

I have sat with one of my old binders by my side (I gave the rest away to friends) as a writing prod, but it did nothing compared to the trigger of seeing other human beings wearing them, the ache in my heart for the pain I couldn’t let myself feel, and the empathy for those who don’t know what it is like to take a deep breath, who must convince themselves that suffocation is comfortable.

The best film I saw in this year’s film festival was “Diagnosing Difference,” a one-hour documentary analyzing, deconstructing and ripping apart the DSM-IV criteria for Gender Identity Disorder. I *had* to procure a letter diagnosing me with this something that is significantly easier to do these days, and although I’ve read extensively on the hoops that those before me had to jump through, hearing someone like Shawna Virago describe going to a gender dysphoria clinic and having to reiterate the standard narrative or the “transgender myth” still moved me.

I’m still trying to understand on how pathology has affected me (my solution was to handle it with humor), how it affects social (non)-acceptance of trans folk, and working to see more clearly how services can be accessed if a medical as opposed to psychological diagnosis is rendered, or if there’s a better solution, something I feel like this movie talked around. But maybe I’m dense. Or looking for simple answers to something that is still being problematized.

There were two thoughts that are not particularly profound, but that resonated with me in that lightbulb kind of way. One was the focus on the word “stereotypical” and how the diagnostic criteria considers it a disease to oppose gender stereotypes. Wow. Need I say more. I believe it was Dylan Scholinski, author of Last Time I Wore a Dress, institutionalized in part for gender identity disorder (an archaic form of treatment reminiscent of electroshock therapy for homosexuals pre-1973) who spoke eloquently (and I’m paraphrasing) about how much sense it makes to question our genders, explore ourselves, build consciousness around who we are, that to miss out on that journey in life is abnormal. It is that sentiment that makes me feel the gift of being transgender for the ways in which it grounds me and connects me to others who care about self-awarenss.

Susan Stryker, my favorite queer “celebrity” (activist/historian/filmmaker/writer/theorist/insightful and brilliant mind) said the simplest and for me, the most mindblowing thing: that because of including GLB and T together, people outside the queer community tend to think of transgender as a sexual orientation. Oh fuck, I thought, if we’re still doing remedial education, which of course we are, the complexity with which I want to discuss my ideas and experience is not only going to get lost on people, but could be catastrophically misleading. For example, living for so many years as a dyke allowed me to see my masculine reflection in my more feminine partners and allowed me to take refuge in a community that embraced masculinity. And where I am now, I see my desire to embrace masculinity as almost a posturing for my unrecognized maleness that is now full of feminine (or rather effeminate) traits. But it’s a bad idea to say something like that to someone like my brother who associates my “gender thing” with my “gay thing” and doesn’t understand that sexual orientation, sex and gender are all different and that masculinity does NOT necessarily correlate with being male.

Finally, I attended the annual Transforming Community event last night in which a handful of diverse queer/transgender people read or spoke about their experiences, followed by a Q&A, more like a conversation, with the audience. Afterwards, my companion said she heard and felt a great deal of pain in the room. On some level, I felt the same way, but of course sexual abuse, violence, discrimination, and improsonment are painful, and for a moment I had some concern that I was dangerously inured to what almost seems standard for gender-variant people. I wanted to go deeper into what was so upsetting and it came in a moment when I could see the trauma in the face of Felicia Elizondo, a community elder who for the sake of this post can be best described as a person who has worked and fought to make my existence possible, and her resistence to the word queer. Of all the horrors she experienced in her life, the one that was most moving to me was seeing her struggle to try to embrace the only word I can find that encompasses me, a word we’ve supposedly “reclaimed. But for the first time ever, watching this transgender activist and leader try to heal from the damage that this word cause, I felt I didn’t have the right to throw it around, to take it as mine.

In the end, I think what I found most painful was what was beneath the surface — that despite our likeness, we are still so different and that the inspiration of our uniqueness is also tinged with loneliness, something that seems dispiriting in a battle whose key feature, for the rest of my lifetime I imagine at least, will be us against the world, not us against us. As with most things honest and compassionate, there was little that was truly divisive during this event, and the conversation, in both intent and practice, increased my awarenss of others and my confidence that in our ability to listen and care, we are building a greater unification. The pervasive sentiment of the evening that rose above the aggrieved voices was that we are each entitled and deserve our own experience and identity and that nobody else’s experience invalidates or erases our own.

A few things I expect to think more about are the “good human being” model of educating society vs. the raising hell model of forced change, and Yosenio V. Lewis’ comment, “There is no art without activism and no activism without art,” and the role I, as a writer, a queer and trans person, and a burgeoning activist can and will play in continuing this conversation.

The most meaningful question I was ever asked and reminded of by teachers repeatedly in graduate school for creative writing was, “Where do you want to enter the dialogue?” It had never occured to me to frame a book in that way, as another voice in one long conversation. This is very hard to do. It requires a person to understand both the historical and contemporary discussion, and there is a great deal of listening needed in order to gather the courage to speak, or for me, anyways. I hope that what I write (and will be published in my memoir as the case now seems to be) contributes and pushes forward the conversations of my community, as well as educates and of course entertains, just like the events of this past week did.

So now it’s time for the party portion of Pride… After all that we’ve been through, I think we deserve the celebration.

It’s been over six months since I took the training wheels off of “Nick” and brought him out of my trans group into my everyday life. There is only one place where I keep him a secret. Every Thursday, I go to the Project Read office in the main library and meet my adult learner. He (we’ll call him S.) is gregarious, charismatic, and greets everyone with a “Hello” followed by their name. When I hear my old name come out of his mouth, I feel empty, weak, and like a liar. The staff in the office uses my old name, too. When I send the volunteer coordinator my hours for the month, I change the name on my email account from Nick to my old one. Then I change it back.

I have come up with every explanation/excuse available: Sometimes I just don’t want to deal with being trans; gender is insignificant to our tutor-learner connection; our cultural and generational experiences (S. is sixty-plus years old and African-American) are so different that telling him I’m “Nick” or transgender won’t mean anything; he sees me as I am and understands my “character” as he calls it, even though when I’m a hardass, he says, “yes, ma’aam”; class, race, privilege guilt that I have the luxury to be trans while he fought drugs, prison, and the same system that made my life so easy; he doesn’t need to know about “Nick” unless I take T; I don’t know how much longer I’ll tutor him, anyways. (I’ve been saying that for the almost year and a half we’ve been together).

Sometimes I have this fantasy where I tell him about “Nick,” and he goes, of course, duh, thank god, that whole “yes, ma’am” business was such a struggle. I picture him shaking his head disappointedly and saying, “It’s about time you told me. I knew.”

S. and I were asked to emcee the tutor-learner recognition event last week. I was shocked because I tend to think I’m an awful, undedicated, slacking tutor. I was doubly surprised when I showed up and the entire place was packed. I don’t know why the staff asked us, but we did a terrific job.

My old name was printed in the program, and for the first time in the last six months, I intentionally wrote it on a name tag (confession: sometimes I accidentally catch myself doodling it), a fate that didn’t anger me since I set it up for myself by keeping a secret.

Most of the event consisted of adult learners sharing their experiences. One learner took the podium to read and was so nervous he sweetly smiled, shaking perceptibly, and said he just couldn’t do it tonight. One woman read from the bible, her face quivering as she held back tears, practicing for her goal of reading in church. Another woman read a story about being blind as an extended metaphor for illiteracy. More adults, including large men, cried in one room than I’d ever seen, not counting this past election night.

Tutors took the stage with their learners, and I was deeply struck by the intimacy in these relationships; in their reflection, I saw S. and myself. I’ve known for awhile now, I guess, that our banter is special, that we were made for each other, and when I admit it, how addicted I am to watching his self-confidence expand, his pride in his dedication and education grow. I have not taught him all that much, but man does he feel good about it, and so do I.

As I watched the event, my name tag glued tightly to me, I understood fully and clearly why I haven’t told him about “Nick.” This is a man whom I have seen at his most vulnerable. I’ve watched and listened to him grope for a few syllables, trying to hear the sounds in words that he cannot spell. For three months, he wrote in a journal; he thought the word was pronounced jonna. Sometimes, he closes his eyes when he is fighting for the letters, struggling, sweating and I sit there silently, because he will figure it out, or at least he will know he tried. I can sit there silently for a long time, thirty seconds at least, just waiting with a kind heart in awe of his unabashed weakness on display, his nakedness.

At the end of the tutor-learner recognition event, S. was floating on our performance, but more than that, he was impressed with mine. “You were so smooth,” he said, shaking my hand and exploding with that huge life-loving grin of his. “It was like you’ve done that before.” What he didn’t know is that I’ve spent a little time in front of the mic. But he doesn’t know a lot of things about me because I do not tell him, because I care about him more than I lead on, because I know that if I show myself to him in the vulnerable way he has revealed himself to me that he could reject me.

I have not told him to call me Nick because I am afraid.

ALLi: I want to get a tattoo again.

Last year, when we were all here in New Orleans, ALLi got a tattoo of the number 152. I went with her, hoping to get a bicycle wheel just below my neck. I brought some images, none that I loved, for artistic direction, and in the end, I skipped it. I decided the tattoo was too big in size, cost, time, obsessive pre-trip thought, and (as ALLi would remind me) I didn’t want to have a blow-up with my parents when they saw this new tattoo at a pool the next month, especially since I was considering chest surgery and wanted to save my energy for that blowup. Besides, I wanted something more like ALLi’s many tattoos, which are like small iconic stamps. But after scrapping the bicycle wheel, it felt too late to be whimsical.

eS: What are you going to get?

ALLi: I like words. I think I’m going to get the word unfold. That’s my favorite word.

Me (aka NiX): You have one. One favorite word? How can you have one favorite word?

ALLi: It’s my favorite. I think about it all the time. I say it a lot to myself. Unfold. eS, come here and write unfold.

eS writes unfold on a piece of scrap paper.

eS: I can do better.

ALLi: It’s perfect.

Me: One? Really? Out of all the words how do you have one favorite?

ALLi: You’re such a fucking writer.

Me: I’ve been wanting a writer tattoo. What about punctuation? I really hate exclamation points.

I pause, look down, look at ALLi.

Me: Maybe I should get an exclamation point.

ALLi: You’re kidding. What about parentheses?

Me: What if I got one on the back of each ankle?

ALLI: That’d be cute. Whatever is or isn’t between your legs would be be parenthetical. Ha ha.

NiX

ALLi

ALLi, eS, NiX

Photos by Mari

Names by ALLi

Don’t think I’ve forgotten. It’s been on my mind for days, weeks, almost a month. I owe you this post, a reflection on the books I did in fact bring and read on my trip to Turkey, the conclusion to my pre-departure post, ”Developing the Travel Booklist.”

What I packed:  Snow (Orhan Pamuk), The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz), The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (Sandy Tolan), The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (Bill Bryson).

What I bought: The White Tiger (Arvind Adiga)

Reading in Turkey: The Reflections of a Traveling Book Whore

Things got off to a bad start. You could even say I blew it. The plan was to finish my library copy of Snow (Orhan Pamuk), a political novel fictionalizing the very real tensions surrounding religion, the State, the West, class, and gender in modern Turkey, before departure. For a variety of reasons, including my dwindling lack of interest in this depressing, humorless story, I had to purchase and bring my own copy, spending the first few days of the trip whining, “I just want this book to end.” Although it did give me some desired context for Turkey, I wish I’d gone with (and am currently reading) Birds Without Wings (Louis de Bernierres) for my ”destination-specific” book.

On the five hour bus ride from Gallipoli to Effesus, I fell in love with Oscar, the protagonist who didn’t get as much page time as I would’ve liked, in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz). What can I say: some of the most inspired original sentences every written, 100 nuanced ways to describe Dominican (and Haitian) women, a plethora of SAT words, New Jersey (where a quarter of my heart lives), and in my opinion, too many points of view that read more like linked short stories than a sustained narrative. I’ve bookclubbed the shit out of this novel with friends and writers alike, and one of the aspects I remain most impressed by is the healthy infusion of Spanish. Not only is it natural for the characters, a gift offering an extra layer of meaning for the bilingual, and clear enough for monolingual readers, it also, without turning me off, made me feel a little stupid for being an American (and a Californian) who doesn’t speak Spanish — a welcome feeling.

The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (Sandy Tolan) – This was the “educational” addition to my travel library, and educate it did, linking together the various things I’ve read and learned about the last 50 plus years of Israel-Palestine history in one book. The vehicle is the interweaving narratives of two people, Dalia and Bashir, and the house they both call home. I thought this book of “serious nonfiction” would take me forever to read, but it took only a few days since reading it became more important than being a tourist. This book also provided me with one of my favorite travel feelings, a sensation of, “I don’t give a damn about those must-see sites; I don’t have to go to work today; I don’t have a cell phone; sex is not an option – all I need is a comfortable seat and decent lighting.”

The Lemon Tree is literary nonfiction at its absolute best — sickly researched and beautifully told. Do you have any idea how hard that is to do? I heard the author, Sandy Tolan, speak at a narrative journalism conference once, and he said that if a person is 6′ 3″ and the doorframe is 6′0″, as an author he would not draw conclusions and write the line, the person “ducked when he entered the room,” unless someone was there to witness and record that moment. While I think his adherence to “fact” is over the top (which is why I write memoir), I’m thoroughly impressed by it, and forever in awe of those who who rock the literary nonfiction world. (The Devil in the White City, Erik Larsen is another impressive one.)

I only needed a book for the flight back and had two choices left: My copy of The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (Bill Bryson) and my brother’s copy of What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Haruki Murakami), a memoir that might have appealed to me more if I hadn’t already read his long essay, excerpted from this short memoir, in the New Yorker. My brother, clearly and expectedly, did not put enough thought into his travel booklist. He brought too many books thinner than a slice of New York pizza, would read one in a day, and then be stuck trading it in for the best of the 6 books at the hostel exchange. And, I was kind of a dick, only willing to loan him Snow and the Bill Bryson book, which he read and kept saying, “You know, it’s about a guy growing up in the 50’s. It’s kinda funny. If you want to read a book about a kid in the 50’s, you’ll like it.” I didn’t and sorry, Bill, you are funny, and I know you’re prolific, but you gotta offer me better than a one in four chance of a good read.

I thought some good magazines could carry me home, so I searched the Amsterdam airport on my layover for the New Yorker (I also brought and read two backissues, cover-to-cover on the trip, something I never have the time to do at home. And I even brought a John McPhee essay about lacrosse from an older issue for Bro – which means I’m not that big of a dick, right?) Anyways, the New Yorker cost $15 there — seriously. So, I did something I’ve never done in my whole entire life: I bought a book at an airport.

One of the things I forgot to mention while developing the travel booklist is the enjoyment I take from perusing foreign bookstores (or airport bookstores in foreign countries, if you will) where bestseller lists, awards, national interests, and the sensibility of the reading public are different from those in America. To conclude my international reading adventure, I picked up White Tiger (Arvind Adiga), the Man Booker Prize (British Award) winning novel that seemed to be in every European tourist’s hand, written by an author who has duel Indian and Australian citizenship. The novel is a very quick read, which gives the illusion of it being a Sue Grafton paperback mystery when really it’s a darkly humorous commentary on class or caste, upward mobility, entrepreneurship, globalization and modernization in India. This book carried me home and through my first sleepless night with jetlag.

 All in all, this was a very successful reading trip.

NK: I saw you on GChat and figured this would be a good time to call.

LJP: I’m Facebooking my little heart out.

NK: I just Facebook messaged someone and didn’t catch any of your activity.

LJP: Really?

NK: Wait… Are we not friends?

LJP: OMG, how are we not friends?

NK: It’s cause we’re friends in real life.

******

For more on Facebook, check out this (slightly old) Mark Morford column. Now that I go to his yoga classes, which are awesome, I feel like I understand his writing in a new way.

I’m told that the statute of limitations on posting trip pictures is a month. With a few days to spare, I bring you the mediocre pictures of two less than average photographers and one only slightly better caption writer, here’s a link to the “best” pictures from Bro and Bro go to Turkey.

This morning on my way to work, I saw a co-worker walking down the street in front of me. He was carrying nothing – no gym clothes and sneakers, no backpack with library books, no magazines, no homemade lunch, no folders with to do lists and rough drafts of essays, no workbooks for tuturing — NOTHING. It always kills me when I see people walk into or out of my office with their hands dangling by their sides while I’m carrying two bags. But I guess when some people leave the house in the morning, they only care about work, and I only care about everything else.

It’s going to take me another month to deal with my travel pics. Until then, here’s my favorite from Amsterdam…

I can’t roam the park, beach, run, or even relax on my back deck with my shirt off. For several more months, while my chest heals, I need to keep my scars completely out of the sun. And because I live in San Francisco, when there’s no sun it’s freezing. And when it’s freezing outside, it’s even colder inside my house. So, basically, due to environmental circumstances and temporary physical limitations, outside of topless activities — shower, sex, dressing, swimming — I haven’t had much topless leisure time.

Shortly after my surgery, I wanted to sleep topless so badly that at night, I’d get into bed and huddle underneath three blankets before taking off my sweatshirt, long-sleeve shirt, beanie, and t-shirt. First thing in the morning, without lifting even one blanket, I’d put the t-shirt, sweatshirt, and hat back on. This got old after a few weeks.

But the recent heat wave in San Francisco has given me the long awaited opportunity to walk around my house in just my underwear. It takes me a few seconds when I get home, about as long as it takes to think, “Fuck it’s hot,” before I realize I can actually take my shirt off, that I want to take my shirt off. I lift my arms, grab the back of my shirt, pull it over my head, and fall back onto my bed. I feel devious, as if I’ve found a suitcase full of unmarked bills, enough to start anew. Freedom. I don’t care where it came from or how I got it. I’m gonna take it and run, run, run…

My eyes fluttered open to the daylight and a flat desolate landscape of rock, scrub brush, and windswept sand. I closed my eyes for another half hour of rest. At 7 am the bus, or what would soon seem like a spaceship landing on an undiscovered planet, dropped us off in Cappadocia (Goreme Village). “Dude, this is weird,” I said. ”Dude, this is weird,” Bro replied. Everywhere we looked, there were large rock cones rising from the earth, many with odd shaped holes that looked like windows. Perhaps it was the delirium of 16 hours of travel, and a night passed sleeping sitting up on the bus with its many interruptions — neck cramps, a violent Turkish drama blasting on the bus TV, the Jandarma (police) waking everyone to check identification — but this place was weird.

Remember those drip castles you made at the beach as a kid, holding the wet sand and letting it spill through your fingers until small hills rose. Now picture them lifesize and you’ve got Cappadocia, a whole region of them. The reality of these formations is not that far off: a volcanic explosion thosands of years ago covered the ground with tuff, or ash, creating nature’s very own drip castles. Exposed to the elements — air, fire, and wind — the rock hardened into a landscape of these geological spectacles, the main draw to this region.

People lived, ate, and prayed in these caves, some of which were called fairy chimneys, for the smoke rising out of the the narrow tops and the observes who imagined that fairies, not humans, must’ve been inside. As you may have guessed, most of the of activities here surround viewing these formations — from the inside (most of the hostels/hotels are in caves), outside, the sky (in a hot air balloon, which we skipped). My fascination carried me through the first day and the open air museum, a collection of cathedral and church caves, many with frescoes from the 11th and 12th centuries, some mindblowing in their intricacy and others that looked like Pictionary drawings of pizza. The second day, we took a bus tour of the region with a variety of odd stops, the green tour, or the “And then” tour.  We’ll see a cave church, and then a valley hike, and then lunch, and then a cave church, and then an underground city (a multi-floored 4km square collection of rooms, tunnels, ventilation shafts, and stone doors, built 50-80 meters below ground that was pretty damn cool and not for the claustrophobic), and then another cave church, and then another cave, and then an onyx demonstration, with its not so subtle purpose to sell us tired and weary souls jewelry.

For fear that this travelogue turned into one giant humorless ”And then” days ago, I’ll stop it right here.

Today, our last full non-travel day of the trip (tomorrow we fly, thankfully, back to Istanbul, and then home on Saturday), and it is raining, our first truly bad weather day. Which suits our mood, our desire to do nothing but cafe hop and read and have one final day of relaxation, both Bro and I knowing we have work on Monday.

While I’m ready for yoga and running, salads and fruit, I could easily stay in Turkey for another two weeks, the time that it would take to explore the Black Sea coast perhaps and maybe head East, slightly off the beaten path, the time that it would take for this place to sink through my skin and seep into my bones. What I have now is an awareness of the history and the challenges of a country that straddles East and West, a developing taste for the varying regional foods, an appreciation for the amazing kindness and friendliness of the Turkish people, and a cursory experience of the different landscapes — sea, city, and moon. But my understanding is vague; this is just the beginning. I’ve always found that to feel a place, I need to sit in it, that understanding comes not from the sights ticked off, but the interstices between them, the absorption of things heard and seen at a market, restaurant, or on the bus.

It’s been a little while since I’ve taken a “backpacking” trip, one in which there is no plan, no agenda, and all is decided as we go. I had my doubts about myself, that I might’ve grown out of my lust for the travel lifestyle that dominated my twenties. And although now, I’m often willing to pay a few bucks more for a double hostel room rather than a dorm, not that much has changed. Yesterday, when we were on the “And then” bus tour, I looked around. We were Spanish, Brazilian, British, South African, American, Canadian, Japanese. Exchange a few words with anyone, and it was clear we’d all been ripped off, slept in gross beds and on long buses, taken a bunch of excessively long monotonous guided tours just like this one, and we were united in that we wouldn’t trade these experiences for anything. I may be older, but the one thing that is the same is that I’m at home on the road, at home with fellow travellers, deepening my humanity and opening myself to the foreigness and vulnerability that comes from stepping outside the known. On that bus, I felt a sense of community as strong as the one I feel in San Francisco amongst my fellow trans guys and queers. At one point, I was chatting with the South African about his time spent living in Zanzibar and the guided overland tours he led from Eastern Africa to the south. “It’s brilliant,” he said. “Oh man, is it brilliant.” My mind took off on the possibilites, the adventure, the enormity of the world and my curiousity to explore it.

But until then, my final advice for those traveling to Turkey: Learn to play backgammon first. Don’t go in July or August.