Sex? Positive.

I dropped the label of lesbian
somewhere between the pool table
and his beer breath hissings of,
"So why don't you like dick?"
and I snapped back,
"It's not that I don't like dick,
It's that I don't like being dicked with."

I had been with enough women
to know that being dicked around
had nothing to do with gender,
so I caught queer on the end
of my cue to play a clean game

Because the first time I ever
got in a fist fight, it was over
the first blow of the words,
"Are you a boy or a girl?"
making contact with my soul
and I had offered up,
"Come here and find out."
He was dumb enough
to cross the street.

Was it because I liked
skateboarding,  play fighting,
tree climbing and He-Man?
Or that I couldn't understand
why I had to keep my shirt on,
wanted permission to play
in the dirt, wear cleats to church,
have a voice that was heard
and not interrupted to be told
to sit with my legs closed?

And because I haven't had
a sex change because I like
having a vagina, not because
I don't want to have a penis,
and not many people seem
to be able to understand this.

It took me thirty-plus years
to own queer, thirty-four
to find the woman I want
to spend my life with,
only in part because she
thinks I look beautiful in
heels and eyeliner
and hot in a suit and fedora
who embraces my inner
Greta Garbo, knowing well
that most nights I will be
more Gene Kelly
and there are not many
women (or men)
who are ok with their
knight in shining armor
having an outpouring
of princess now and again.

So many years of trying
to choose when the choice
was so clearly both and neither
and where forms have those
stupid little boxes marked
Male and Female, I greet them
with a red pen, scrawl through
with a defiant and certain,  YES.

Sex? Positive.
Queer as the day I was born
when the doctor called out,
"It's a girl!"
and I wailed in protest.