Suffer now, and live the rest of your life as a champion.

First of all, thank you so much to all the people who stopped by my blog over the past few days, as well as the people who gave me shout outs or added me to their blog rolls.  As an ex-math major, I certainly know the meaning of “outlier”, and further know that the traffic I got on Friday fits the bill!  But, if you liked what you saw, I hope you will stick around.  I can’t tell you what it means to me to receive supportive comments.  Other than my girlfriend and close friend (my sole readership previous to this event), and a couple stray comments here and there, yours is the first support I have gotten in the first steps of this journey, and I really appreciate it.

As for the actual content of this post, I wanted to talk about my weekend.  Whoop whoop!  On Saturday night, I went out with ruggers to a very straight bar in the Loop (downtown for you out-of-towners).  There were stripper poles.  And when we walked by, some guy was like, “Ladies, come on in, come on in!”  Seriously? Okay, dude.  We’re here.  We’ve arrived.

I don’t know how much time queer people spend in straight bars.  Personally, I spend so much time in straight space during the week that it’s a little pleasure to escape into a world that makes perfect sense to me, and where I don’t feel like I’m holding myself in or on my guard.  But – to this bar they wanted to go, and I wanted to hang out with them.  Thus, I followed.  And so did my girlfriend.

Which brings me to one of the reasons I hate straight bars.  My girlfriend is hot.  Like, super hot.  This isn’t just something I think, because I’m gross and in loooove and have been dating her for two years.  It’s something the world thinks.  Especially straight guys at straight bars (actually, gay guys at gay bars too – different story).  Luckily, I’m 6 feet tall, heavily muscled and tattooed, and no dude in his right mind would mess with my girl.  Right?  Of course not.

A lot of people who know me might find the fact that I consider myself tough laughable.  I complain every time I jam my finger.  But I am tough.  I play rugby and run into big strong women on purpose.  I also used to do karate, and can hold my own in a fight.  At least a drunken bar fight – I think.  It’s actually never happened to me, but I was pretty good, back in the day.  Still, I know that people don’t look at me and think, “oh, shoot, I don’t want to mess with that bitch.”  So when this guy started getting handsy with my girlfriend and I could tell she didn’t like it, I just waited patiently while she extricated herself from the situation, instead of heading over there and saying, “Hey buddy, she’s taken.” because I knew he’d just laugh in my face, and it would probably make the situation worse.

That kind of hurts.  One of the reasons I love my relationship with my girlfriend is that I get to be her “protector” – not always, of course she can stick up for herself, as Saturday night proved.  But shouldn’t I at least get to be possessive and snarly when other people think she’s available?  Furthermore, I think of “tough” as being something that’s tied up with butchness.  How can I be butch without being respected?  But I guess I’m forgetting that respect is something you have to earn, and the randoms you see in a straight bar on Saturday night are not my target audience.