Feature image via Daniel Ortberg’s Instagram
One of the strange things about dating someone of whom you were, once, a fan (and certainly are no longer, once you have beaten them at chess roughly 85% of the time since you both started playing) is that you acquire information about your own place in the writing that you enjoyed so much. Danny and I were just gamboling and cavorting as lovers do, and we recalled a conversation we had when we met, about two and a half years before we kissed. And a good two years before we were at all secure in relation to our transitions — of which, as you all probably know by now, Danny’s was more epiphanic and mine more gradual.
The conversation we just recalled was this. Back in 2015, I had recently learned the phrase “down to clown” as a euphemism for sexual intercourse, and Danny offered me $100 if I could successfully secure a date from someone by asking them if they were, indeed, available for a trip to the big top. We used to meet in bars — I was still drinking when we met, though he wasn’t — and I would sit and get steamed while working up the courage to find someone to make the merry circus with me. It never happened. Anyway, just now, Danny revealed (and I suppose it was, in retrospect, quite obvious) not only that he was attempting to flirt with me, but that his frustration at my inability to tell that he wanted to make like Dumbo and get flappy led him to write a piece of his that I loved, “A Guide to Flirting With Plausible Deniability,” which was published on The Toast on January 11th, 2016 — a week to the day before my last drink, and two years, five months and five days before Danny finally became my Ringmaster.
I loved that piece! And the sequels:
– “How to Tell If Someone Is Flirting With You,” March 1st, 2016.
– “How to Respond When You Suspect Someone Is Flirting With You,” April 26th, 2016.
I asked Danny… were there other things you wrote to try to get my attention? Sheepishly, he admitted that there were and started sending me them. Looking back the flirtation was sort of obvious? Danny characterized the general tone as “I wanted you to know I didn’t speak French, but that I was still smart.”
– “High Water-Marks For Heterosexuality,” March 8th 2016.
– “Sondheim As I Understand Him, From A Woman Who Has Seen About One Cumulative Hour Of Sondheim’s Work And Almost Certainly Misunderstood It,” April 25th 2016.
– “Movie Yelling: Tea and Sympathy, Sixty Years Later,” May 2nd, 2016.
– “The Best Part of Jane Eyre Is Guessing What French Is,” May 20th, 2016.
I kind of knew that the Sondheim one was flirtation, and was irritated by it at the time. Which reminds me that, damn, it must just have been kind of sad to be hung up on someone that is just too fucking messy (I was so fucking messy) to be able to respond, however much she wanted to:
– “What Was the Most Dirtbag Summer of Your Life,” February 4th, 2016.
– “Prayers That Would Double As Excellent Pickup Lines If I Possessed Even An Ounce Of Real Courage,” January 19th, 2016.
I date my sobriety to the day before Danny published those prayers, some of which I had probably still never heard. Then there were the ones in which I made a direct appearance under my old name and pronouns, usually being negged (the first thing he said to me was a spiky little barb about my mustache). Often I am a bit of a prig in these appearances, in the first of which I made a joke about the Michigan Women’s Festival.
– “Movie Yelling: Things About The Witch That Got My Dander Right Up, Like The Ending And All The Stuff That Came Before It,” February 25th 2016.
– “Christina Rossetti’s Goblin-Market, As I Understand It,” July 26th, 2017.
And, finally, here’s the Toast post that Danny put up the day we met.
– “Characters I Have Inappropriately Identified With When I Knew I Was Not Supposed To,” December 2nd 2015.
He can’t now remember whether he did so before or after he’d started clowning on my mustache. But anyway, I was down.
This article first appeared on The Stage Mirror — Grace Lavery’s newsletter on “Victorian literature, psychoanalytic theory, academic gossip, trans femme style, and scurrilous ribaldry from Califorinian writer and critic”, which you can and should subscribe to now — and is republished here with permission!
